Forest Lost

“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. Forest Lost 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

"Forest Lost provides a complex account of the dynamics and relations that bring green capitalist initiatives to life. . . . The book would be excellent for methods and ethnography courses, since it shows how to approach complex global environmental topics through grounded research that balances localized approaches to fieldwork with careful analysis of policy and legal frameworks that span scales." - Jeffrey Hoelle, American Ethnologist

"The main strength of this book lies in its commitment to locally grounded inquiry into the perceptions, implications, and contradictions of carbon projects. It is well-structured and written in an impressively accessible manner, enabling readers to envision the idiosyncrasies of Acre and the careful narrative’s protagonists while simultaneously offering a nuanced analysis of the state’s role in mediating the encounter between global markets and forest communities." - Claudia Horn, Conservation and Society

“Greenleaf’s book exemplifies the best type of ethnographic work.”

"Greenleaf illustrates comprehensibly and in an accessibly written fashion . . . the mutually dependent beneficiary relations that emerge [in green capitalism]." - Olivia Bianchi, Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford

"Maron Greenleaf’s Forest Lost is a compelling depiction of the socio-economic relations behind economic development." - Nikita Taniparti, Anthropological Notebooks

"Indispensable. [Greenleaf's] nuanced, ground-level portrait will . . . richly reward anyone intent on understanding the messy, contradictory realities faced by rural producers on the rainforest frontier." - Esteve Corbera, Journal of Peasant Studies

"Forest Lost is an important book that advances our understanding of increasingly important questions in the Amazon basin and of green capitalism writ large. The book makes substantial contributions to contemporary conversations on sustainability, valorization processes, more-than-human politics, welfarism, redistribution, and global governance." - Eduardo Romero Dianderas, Economic Anthropology

"A fascinating, multifaceted account of how carbon offset initiatives aimed at reducing deforestation ... have led to forests being valued economically and culturally in new ways in the Amazonian state of Acre, Brazil." - Casey High, Journal of Anthropological Research