Maron E. Greenleaf's "Forest Lost"

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

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Forest Lost: Producing Green Capitalism in the Brazilian Amazon, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Forest Lost is about how a government program in the Amazon tried to make the living rainforest monetarily valuable in order to protect it. The program is a prominent example of widespread efforts to combat climate change using market mechanisms, like carbon offsets or credits. Forests keep a significant amount of carbon in trees, plants, and soils, a lot of which goes into the atmosphere if they are burned or degraded. This includes the Amazon rainforest (the world’s largest), which is hugely important for climate change, biodiversity, and the lives and livelihoods of the people who live there. It’s also being destroyed at an alarming rate, in part because it’s worth more dead than alive. The Acrean government tried to change that by making the living forest and its carbon monetarily valuable.

Page 99 is part of my explication of a key part of that effort: to make “forest carbon into a source of public wealth whose value it [the state government] could redistribute as benefits” to poor rural people. On this page, I explore two ways that this approach differed from the private property-focus of many other forest carbon offset projects. First, that it “decoupled forest carbon’s value” from land and its ownership—a thorny issue in a region where formal land rights are often unclear. Second, how the program moved forest carbon’s value from land—where it could more easily be captured by wealthy large landholders—to labor. This included labor undertaken by poor rural people that the government deemed to protect the forest. The people could then be characterized as “providers of ecosystem services” eligible to receive government benefits.

Reading page 99 offers a glimpse of a key component of Forest Lost’s analysis: that the Amazonian program’s effort to make the living forest valuable differed significantly from many characterizations of carbon offsets and other iterations of what I call “green capitalism.” Page 99 focuses on an important example of this: the sidestepping of private property and the valorization of labor. However, the page (being only a page) doesn’t give the full picture. It doesn’t reveal how the shift from land to labor was key to the development of an environmentally-premised welfare state—the opposite of what apparently neoliberal, green capitalist schemes (like carbon offsets) are supposed to produce. This analysis, in turn, is part of the book’s larger story about how green capitalist efforts to address climate change rely on and remake the relations of everyday life in one of the world’s most climatically essential landscapes.

Visit Maron E. Greenleaf's website.

--Marshal Zeringue