“In this compelling book Maron E. Greenleaf disentangles the overwhelmingly complex socio-ecological, political-economic, and interspecies relationships that have resulted in the climate crisis and also must be understood and transformed to combat the crisis. She does this through a brilliant analysis of ‘green capitalism’ and its history, transformative power, failings, and afterlives.” - Paige West, Claire Tow Professor of Anthropology, Barnard College and Columbia University “Maron E. Greenleaf’s key insight that making forest carbon entails a remaking of socio-environmental relations-a complex and open-ended process that presents challenges as well as opportunities-allows her to retheorize the making of value through novel relations, reworkings, and speculations about what’s to come in rural Amazonia. <i>Forest Lost</i> makes a signal contribution to the study of the political ecology of the region while offering explanatory frames that will help illuminate the global proliferation of carbon markets with the care and attention that ethnographic immersion allows.” - Jeremy M. Campbell, author of (Conjuring Property: Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon)
Preface: Green Capitalism xi
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction 1
1. Carbon Boom 33
Interlude I. Highway Landscapes 57
2. Producing the Forest 64
Interlude II. The Flood 83
3. Robin Hood in the Untenured Forest 86
Interlude III. The Rural Road, Part 1 111
4. Beneficiaries and Forest Citizenship 114
Interlude IV. The Rural Road, Part 2 128
5. The Urban Forest 131
Afterword. Carbon Bust 153
Notes 165
Bibliography 231
Index 271