Forest Lost is an ethnography of forest carbon offsets and the wider effort to make the living rainforest valuable in the Brazilian Amazon. Unlike other forest commodities, forest carbon offsets do not involve resource extraction; instead, they require keeping carbon in place through forest protection. Maron E. Greenleaf explores forest carbon offsets to understand green capitalism—the use of capitalist logics and practices to mitigate environmental damage. She traces cultural, environmental, governmental, material, and multispecies relations involved in making forest carbon valuable as well as how forest carbon’s commodification in the Amazon turned it into a source of redistributable public environmental wealth. At the same time, Greenleaf shows how making forest carbon monetarily valuable created an unexpected set of uneven, contingent, and contested social and political relations. While forest carbon in the Amazon demonstrates that green capitalism can be socially inclusive, it also shows that green capitalism can reinforce the marginalization it purportedly seeks to combat. By outlining these complex relations and tensions, Greenleaf elucidates broader efforts to create a capitalism suited to the Anthropocene and those efforts’ alluring promises and vexing failures.

Maron E. Greenleaf is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Dartmouth College.

Abbreviations  ix
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