Maron E. Greenleaf, "Forest Lost: Producing Green Capitalism in the Brazilian Amazon" (Duke UP, 2024)
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Hello everybody and welcome to the Anthropology Channel of the New Books Network. I am your host of this episode, Olivia Bianchi, a Master's student of Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology at the University of Oxford. I am very excited to talk to Maren E. Greenleaf about her book Forest Lost, Producing Green Capitalism in the Brazilian Amazon, published 2024 by Duke University Press.

The book is a well thought out ethnography that disentangles the relationships at play that make up the Amazonian forest in the state of Acre. It is an important addition to the research field of green capitalism and I'm very pleased to talk to Maren today. Thank you so much for accepting my invitation. So happy to be here Olivia, thanks for having me. To get us started,

Could you tell our listeners briefly about the book and your research behind it? How did you come about going to Acre? And what led you to write this book? Yeah, definitely. So...

Before I went to get a PhD in anthropology, I went to law school in the U.S. I wanted to be an environmental lawyer working on climate change law. And this was in the 2000s. So at a time there was a lot of excitement about carbon markets and

Carbon offsets. There was in the U.S. almost a law passed at the national level in 2009 to create a cap and trade market. So there was this real sense of kind of energy and momentum and tropical forests were kind of being brought into carbon markets for the first time ever.

as well. And I started studying that from a kind of legal perspective in law school, trying to understand how the efforts to kind of make carbon valuable in tropical forests, what that would do to people's rights, essentially their property rights. And I

I found that there was not very much research done on the ground, empirical research. There was a lot of theorizing and people kind of taking, you know, kind of pro and con stances on what the impacts of these efforts would be, but not that much work on the ground. So I decided I wanted to kind of do that research myself, find out what does it

do politically, socially, culturally, not just environmentally, to make a new commodity in tropical forests valuable. This

carbon that we're learning is so important for the stability of global climate. And so I continued on and got a PhD and started studying this from within the discipline that had kind of helped me make sense of the world most, which was anthropology. And I started, I wanted to work kind of where carbon is.

forest carbon efforts were most advanced and most kind of prominent. And that was the state of Acre, Brazil, because of a long history that we can talk about. But it had kind of at the time, this was in the kind of early 2010s, that had the world's most prominent effort to make forest carbon valuable. So that's how I ended up doing work there. And, you know, I wanted to publish the book because

forest carbon offsets are a way I think of exploring green capitalism, which I think of as this effort to use capitalist logics and practices to address the environmental degradation that capitalism is, I would say, mostly responsible for. And so the

The kind of looking at forest carbon in the Amazon, which is one of the world's most climatically important landscapes, allowed me to kind of think about green capitalism more broadly as a shift, a potential shift in the way that economies across the globe are organized or being reorganized in the context of climate change and other environmental crises.

All right. Thank you so much. And it's interesting with these shifts and the historic context that you said in the book as well. Right. You've already mentioned that Akri is a bit special because it's it was sort of at the forefront of a lot of the things you just touched about. But also it has always been at the periphery in so many different ways. I really appreciate it in the first chapters how you describe.

how you encompass the whole complexity of the mere positionality of the place and the forest. It was very interesting.

So, yeah, how long did you stay in Akri and how did you go about doing the ethnographic research there? Was it your first bigger ethnographic research, I assume? And then I would also be interested to know how the people sort of responded to you as a researcher and how hard it was to gain certain spaces, access, if that was easy or hard. Yeah.

Yeah, definitely. So I spent all in all about 15 months in in Accra over basically from 2012 through 2014.

And my research had a few different phases. The first kind of major part of my research, I worked with this international research organization called CIFOR, which is the Center for International Forestry Research based in Indonesia. And they were doing this international study comparing...

carbon projects and programs across a number of different countries. And ACRI was one of their sites. And I worked as the co-leader of a research team of about 10 people, mostly ACRI and students. And we did a survey that C4R had designed of

of about 240 rural smallholders who locally are called rural producers. So I started off the kind of major section of my research doing that survey. And it was a great way to, um, learn about rural Acre and kind of, uh, get immersed there. And also to kind of learn about how forest carbon was being thought of and, and, and researched, uh,

as internationally. And then I did a long period of independent research, ethnographic research, which involved spending time in rural areas, particularly this area that I had done the C4 research in. I went back and spent time there. And this was along this highway that comes to play a major role in the book, the BR-364, which was being paved

during the time I was there and the paving of roads and the Amazon is pretty clearly linked to increases in deforestation. And so this was a crucial time in this rural area with the paving of the road, what would be the impact of

on the forest and the people who lived around it. So I did research in this rural area. I also spent a lot of time in, um, the capital city of the state of Akron. So Rio Branco or, um, Rio Branco. Uh, and there I worked, uh, uh, I did a lot of interviews and participant observation with some different government agencies, state agencies, and also, uh,

Spent time with agricultural and agroforestry extension agents, going out with them into rural areas, accompanying them in their work to try to get people to work.

deforest less and to produce more simultaneously. And then, you know, did lots of interviews with the people who were working on issues related to the forest and its protection and its valorization and

uh it was let's see that the the question of access and kind of how people responded to me as a researcher um i mean being coming in through c4 was a great uh great way to to gain kind of gain familiarity and get to know people in a rural area um which could would be difficult otherwise uh in in uh

the city and in government offices, you know, people were very welcoming and open to my research, which I so appreciated. Um, I think the kind of biggest question I had to address was, um, kind of dispelling the idea that I was there to evaluate them. Like I, I tried to make clear again, again, this is not evaluative research. I'm not trying to, uh,

assess whether or not the effort to make forest carbon valuable is, is having a negative or positive impact on the forest or even on people and trying to understand what it does politically and culturally. And I really also tried to take people's, you know, the people working in the government, take them seriously as, as,

people who were genuinely working to address problems that they saw in their state and I think approaching them as people who were working really hard helped me understand their work and helped them to trust me as well.

I will say there were some private projects, private forest carbon projects not connected to the state that were being created within ACRE at the time. And I did some research on them, but there the companies had me sign a kind of nondisclosure agreement or some kind of agreement that I think they would have to look at any research that I...

any publications I wrote based on the research I did. So I didn't write about, I didn't end up writing about those projects. Interesting. Thank you so much. So yeah, you already touched upon a few of the stakeholders you researched and that you all encompassed in your book very eloquently.

And at the beginning of the book, I remember you elaborating that you initially had the idea of doing more of a follow the thing, a supply chain kind of analysis to this new commodity, forest carbon offset. Could you tell us a bit about the limitations that you faced that sort of let you shift to a more relational and network analysis of what was going on? And maybe a

within that sort of the characteristics that make this commodity special? Yeah, definitely. Yeah, so what drew me to study this topic was the creation of this new commodity. As you said, this carbon, forest carbon offsets that we're going to be

sold around the world. And I was really interested in, in how you create a new commodity and also the particularities of this commodity, which I'll talk about in a second. But so I was like, okay, I'm going to study this the way other critical scholars have studied other commodities. So I can do a kind of supply chain analysis. I can follow forest carbon from,

from its production, forest carbon offsets from their production to their purchase along this kind of chain. And, you know, this is kind of inspired by the work of Arjuna Potorai and others, the idea of things having a social life and that we can follow them. And so when I, but when I tried to do that with Inakri, it didn't work so well. So when I, well,

would bring up forest carbon or forest carbon offsets and interviews. They would often, they wouldn't stay the topic of the conversation. They were hard to talk about people. We talk about them a little bit, but then we would quickly move on to other related, but different topics. And similarly, when I sat in, you know, I sat in a lot of meetings and workshops and, and conferences and, and those two in those contexts as well, um,

forest carbon and forest carbon offsets weren't prominent, weren't the thing that people were talking about. And at first I kind of, you know, freaked out about this a little bit, like, how am I going to do this project as I planned it out? I want to follow this from its production to its purchase. And it keeps disappearing. And

And also I'll say that there were no carbon offsets that the state did not sell any carbon offsets when I was there. So there was no purchase. Ultimately, there were the there were payments for emissions reductions. But these carbon offsets that I had initially wanted to study kind of were not turned out to not actually manifest fully. So at first I kind of.

found this very troublesome. And then I decided, oh, actually, this is really interesting. This is an interesting ethnographic puzzle, actually. And it helped me to think about what carbon offsets were, that they were this kind of strange commodity, unlike

most commodities, especially things that come from tropical forests, there was no extraction, right? There was no, it wasn't like gold being extracted and then sold or other resources being extracted and sold and circulated. In fact, the way that forest carbon comes to have value is that it has to stay in place. It has to not be extracted. And so then what comes to

kind of have value is the, the, an action not taken. So sometimes we talk about a tree not being cut down, right? So that's a kind of weird thing to, to have or create value. And when I started to think about that more, I realized that,

That forest carbon isn't really a thing that I could follow, but it's a state rather a state of being right. It's carbon held in the forest, not carbon, not extracted a tree, not being cut down. And then I started to think, OK, well, how does a tree not get cut down and how does carbon stay in the forest? Actually, it's.

About all sorts of other things and relationships between things. It's about the trees and that they are holding the carbon and the relationship between the trees and the relationship between the trees and the other species, including humans. And then once I started to kind of pay attention to those relationships, I

As the kind of, as you say, kind of the network that holds forest carbon in place, that really shifted my research and opened it up to in a way that let me understand a kind of myriad species and infrastructures and political relationships that are being enlisted in this effort to make forest carbon valuable.

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a lot of those relationships very well because often if you think of these, especially the non-human relationships that make up such a context, you mentioned the trees, the other products that are being produced, they seem a bit harder to grasp, also harder to write about and think about, imagine, especially from a person that's never been to the Amazonian forests. So I really appreciated those interludes and thinking about the interludes and your

your structure overall of the book led me to a set of questions I'd like to ask you. So yeah, where do you place yourself in the theoretical discussion that's going on in this like non-human turn? So the attention that we now put to relationships that

a human that take place between other living beings or things that are considered not living. And maybe also, because that's a very anthropological discussion, or I feel like it's very integral in the discipline of anthropology at the moment. So maybe where comes your...

train your legal training in to that be very interested to know more about that yeah definitely so certainly um scholarship in anthropology and other disciplines on multi-species relations is very helpful in helping me make that kind of uh

both conceptual and methodological shift from following the thing to focusing on relations. You know, Indigenous thinking around in the Amazon and elsewhere around relations is important and also work in feminist economic anthropology and kind of allied disciplines that don't take capitalism as, you know, a set concept.

coherent force in the world, but rather as explore capitalism as a, a set of contingent, um, historically situated relations and processes, um, that are made and enacted in everyday life. Um, that was very helpful in helping me approach, uh,

green capitalism and forest carbon offsets within Acre. Um, and it really resonated with the way that with forest carbon as this new commodity, um, as something that only exists only has value, uh, through the interrelations of all these other species and, uh,

infrastructures and relationships that go that exist within the forest, but also far beyond the forest. My legal training was really helpful in bringing my attention to questions of property and ownership.

and land, um, and bringing those issues and those topics into that relational thinking. Um, so thinking about how does the issue of land rights, the complex, um, uh, situation surrounding, uh, land rights and property in the Amazon, how does that relate to carbon and, um,

and efforts to make the forest carbon value so valuable. So I, the legal training really focused me on kind of political questions, political in the sense of about rights and about citizenship. And that of course, gelled with a lot of thinking within anthropology around citizenship and, and political rights coming from, you know,

thinkers like James Holston, who's worked in Brazil on issues of citizenship, and then Nikhil Anand's work on

hydraulic citizenship in India, bringing in kind of water into that. So those are some of the thinkers who were really influential and helped me bridge the kind of legal training and this more relational focus from feminist economic anthropology and political ecology.

Yeah, very interesting. I remember reading your paragraphs on land rights and feeling that the complexity that takes place there is very well elaborated and that your legal training very much shines through in the way that you explain it as well. And I

I think it's probably very crucial to highlight talking about land rights. You mentioned capitalism, right? But I guess the colonial past and the context that you elaborate in the first chapter of the book are also very integral in making up the complexities of Acre. Maybe you can speak a bit more about that as well. Sure, certainly. So Acre was colonized primarily because of its rubber trees, right?

And so it has a bountiful kind of natural ecology supporting environment.

rubber trees, um, in certain parts of the state. And when, you know, the automobile industry took off in the late 1800s, early 1900s, um, the Amazon was, uh, the main source of rubber for tires. Um, and Acre had some of the best rubber trees in, uh, within the Amazon. So, uh,

A lot of Brazilian people came, especially from the northeast of Brazil, to tap rubber. There were also people from Bolivia and Peru. The state was part of Peru and Bolivia before it became part of Brazil. So rubber...

brought, you know, colonists to this state. And, of course, we see there the relationship between colonization and capitalism, right? Because it's part of the growth of industrial capitalism and fossil fuel capitalism that made rubber really valuable around the world and then facilitated the development

colonization of the state within kind of South American geopolitical relations.

Yeah, very interesting. And then paralleling that to carbon, a lot of it resonated. Again, there's like the positionality of the place between like being at the frontier, so like being discovered for commodity, but then also being in the periphery and very much sort of exposed to the forces that make up how it's supposed to work, right? Yeah, exactly. Just to...

to add. So because rubber and, and I should say that the way that rubber tapping took place and continues to take place in Acre doesn't kill the tree. It, it, it,

you tap rubber from living trees and those trees have to exist within a biodiverse forest. You can't really plant them in plantations in the Amazon very well because there's a blight that spreads really fast as, uh,

People like Henry Ford learned the hard way when they tried to do this themselves back in the early 1900s. So you tap rubber from the living forest, essentially. And so it's similar, as you point out, to...

forest carbon in that the value, this valuable product comes from the living forest. So rubber and for carbon. And so that makes them kind of different than other kinds of commodities. And yet they're similar in that they're

kind of subject to the, um, the ups and downs of markets, uh, in ways that can be very consequential and in some way, and then devastating to local economies. Um, when the rubber trade, uh, collapsed in the 20th century, uh,

that decimated the economy within Acre for decades. And, you know, similarly, the kinds of ups and downs of the emergent carbon economy had pretty profound impacts on Acrean politics and the people who live there. Yeah. Bringing up the trees, what just came to my mind is this vignette towards the end of the book, I think it was, where you shift your attention from the rural areas

forest to the urban forest. And there was this one participant in your research that you elaborated how he, I think it was taking a selfie with one of these trees that still had like the carvings of the rubber tapping and then elaborating how that's not something

he sees anymore, but he has a lot of memories about because it's so deeply rooted in family and then past professions and the reasons why people migrated to Agri. So yeah, I was very, like I said, intrigued by the structure of your book and especially considering the relational approach you took. I wondered how much...

how much intentionality you put in the structure of your book. So which of the relationships you brought up when, and now maybe in hindsight, if you would have maybe changed the structure a bit, or if there's any relations you would have highlighted more or differently than others.

Yeah, definitely. I wanted to start with rubber because you kind of can't tell the story of Acre or Acrean forest carbon without talking about rubber. So that's the kind of first set of relations, those surrounding rubber that I focus on in chapter one. And I look at how rubber is so foundational to Acrean.

Akron history to its colonization to its heritage as the vignette you just described brings up. And now even to forest carbon, that rubber is part of what makes forest carbon valuable and it becomes a kind of story in itself. So I look at kind of the creation of

how rubber helps to constitute forest carbon's value. So I had to start with rubber. There was, there's no, no other way really to start the, this, a book focused on acree. And then I wanted to end with kind of the, some of the limitations or failures of green capitalism and,

The way that it and the way those get kind of imbricated into concerns about corruption and power and crime and violence.

I and and inequality and this kind of urban rural divide and the way the forest shows up in and in urban life and makes urban life better was a way to to do that. So I kind of end with with the urban forest and the kind of relations of heritage that I.

surround it. And as I was finishing the book, I kind of realized how much the research I had done and was writing about how much it helped us to understand the rise of kind of right-wing populism in Brazil, which an inaccurate term

And in particular, with support for the election of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. And Bolsonaro lost the election after that, but still won the vote in Acre. So it was only kind of later on in the book process, the writing process that I recognize this is the story of green capitalism and its limitations helps us understand the rise of Bolsonaro.

and the rise of deforestation along with him. And so that last chapter kind of gestures to that, and I think helps us understand it a bit. But, you know, if I was going to rewrite the book now, I might center those kind of the connections with the rise of right-wing populism even more. All right. Thank you so much for those insightful answers.

I've mentioned your interludes before and I think your voice and your thoughts as an ethnographer, they really shine through in those interluding chapters. I remember you reflecting, for example, on the fish ponds and the road that you've already mentioned as well, the BR364 that runs through the States.

You've reflected on their potential in increasing deforestation, which you've also mentioned before. Your afterword, as you also said, talks a lot about how the race of Bolsonaro came about. And I wondered, obviously your book has only recently been published, but maybe there's even more news on it. Or maybe you've even been to Acre since recently? Yeah, so...

I have not been back to AccuSense, but I'm developing a new research project there with a colleague. And so the plan is to go back, I think, probably next year in 2026. Yeah.

and I'm also working on getting the book translated into Portuguese. So that's a kind of next step to increase the accessibility of it there. Um, but it will be, yeah, change kind of landscape to go back. Um, to there has been increasing deforestation. It's kind of gone up and down. Um, but, uh, certainly it, it, it, uh,

It's higher than it was during parts of my research anyway. So we'll see what happens this burning season, as they call it. But, you know, the pressures to deforest continue, the valuation of cattle continues.

ranching and cleared land, both economically and culturally continues, even as efforts to address and contain deforestation and make the forest valuable as part of what's now being talked about as the bioeconomy, even as those efforts continue as well.

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And if I understood correctly, under the current political governance, there is non-such projects like the ones you looked at in the early 2010s, right? So like the green capitalist or the forest carbon offset project.

funding projects are all at a halt. They're not a thing at the moment, right? No. So interestingly, because the 2010 law that I focused on called CISA, the System of Incentives for Environmental Services, is a law, right? So

It's it can't it's a state law. And so that has continued, even if its implementation has in some ways changed. And the governor who was elected in 2018 and again in 2022, from my understanding, and I haven't been doing research, active research on it, but my understanding from kind of following in the press and talking to people is that, you know, he is.

he is still talking green capitalism. Like there is an effort to produce

produce more but in ways that uh contain deforestation so he is signed partnerships with international um actors and and is continuing to uh kind of green capitalist efforts even if they look somewhat different than the administration before and even as even as there is also a push to um

towards agribusiness. The other thing that's changed, you know, is at the at the federal level in Brazil, Bolsonaro was in power between, you know, 2019 and 2023, basically, and

But now the president, President Lula, has been working to contain deforestation. So there's a shift at that federal level that also influences state policy and state policy.

enforcement of laws containing that address deforestation. So it's a complicated situation, but it's not as clear cut as just a kind of moving on from green capitalism. I mean, the thing is, of course, climate change is continuing and capitalism is continuing. So even if it takes different forms, I think green capitalism is here to stay in some form or another. Thank you.

Thank you. Yeah. And again, the complexity shines through again. And also, I think how fast paced that these changes are, which was also very dominant in how you talked about the roads, the BR364, that if I understood right, by the end of its paving being done,

Some parts already started to crumble. So this really, I think, goes to the core of how fast those changes are, yet how tactile in the place. Yeah, maybe you can talk a bit more about the road, because I thought it was a very interesting choice to have it as a red thread through the book.

Yeah, definitely. So the BR-364 is one of kind of two main paved roads in the state of Acre, and it's the one that connects it to the rest of Brazil. And I didn't, when I started the research, I certainly didn't think I was going to be writing about roads, but

I, as I mentioned before, roads are seen as kind of a main contributor to Amazonian deforestation for good reason, because of the way they bring in people and economies that are based on deforestation and facilitate kind of colonization processes as well as part of that. Yeah.

So if anything, I thought the BR-364 was going to be kind of, you know, a kind of bad character in the book. But what I discovered was much more complicated. You know, I wrote on the BR-364 all the time to get to my field sites, right?

state and, and non-governmental actors working to contain deforestation also relied on the BR three 64 for rural people. It was a, they talked about it as an absolute positive in their life that it brought, you know, goods that they wanted. It allowed them to sell crops that, and the forest products that they produced and collected and,

And it allowed them to get access to education and medical care. So it was, you know, of all the government policies I talked to them about and government projects I talked to them about, the BR-364 was great.

was maybe the most positive. And so I had to grapple with that. You know, my dependence on it, governmental efforts to stop deforestation's dependence on the road, the way that rural people valued it,

as well as the ways that it contributed to deforestation and accelerated a kind of deepening inequality in the region. And so I try to bring that complexity in as one of the, you know, I bring the road in as one of the kind of characters, one of the characters

characters that forest carbon is connected to. It has a relationship with. So the sets of relationships that are connected to the road are part of those that kind of determine whether forest stays in place or is released. And the way I decided to bring it in was, bring the road in was through these interludes. So, you know, the road kind of snaked through my research. It kept popping up.

And I decided to kind of use that to structure the book as well. So each of the interludes is connected to the BR-364 in different ways. So it became a major part of the book, even though that was certainly not my intention at the beginning. Yeah, interesting how these things unfold as you research and then later write. Yeah, very interesting. Yeah.

Yeah, thank you for all these enriching insights. You've already briefly mentioned that you already have a future research project again in ACRI. Is there anything more you can or want to share about this or any other interesting set of questions that you're drawn to at the moment? Yeah, so the project in ACRI is in early stages, but I'm hoping to look more at rubber tapping and

that is continuing on there in some form. So a kind of different iteration of green capitalism.

I'm also have been working on another project actually in the UK connected to trees and tree planting. So I when I was in Akron, I heard this critique often, even like on my second day there, someone said, you know, well, you and you in the United States, you cut down all your trees already. And that's part of how you got wealthy.

And now you're coming down here and telling us we can't cut down our trees. And I heard this, some version of this from a lot of people, often kind of a little bit jokingly. I also, you hear it in, you know, from politicians and politicians.

different thinkers in Brazil. And I would try to clarify, I'm not here to tell anyone what to do at all. I'm just trying to understand, you know, efforts that are, you know,

happening here now to contain deforestation, many of them connected to actually local social movements. But that kind of critique, which is really a critique of, you know, of Western colonialism, it stuck with me and it made me want to look at

environmental relations taking place in places that are kind of the main cause of climate change rather than focusing on places that are like the Amazon that contribute but are not the historical causes of the problem. And at the same time, as I was starting to kind of think about wanting to work in that kind of more post-industrial environment,

environment. There's all this talk internationally about tree planting and new commitments to tree planting, the Trillion Trees Initiative, and the idea that if we can just plant enough trees to suck up all this carbon, that's a

Maybe that can save us. Maybe that's a way out. And so I came across this tree planting efforts taking place in northern England around Manchester and elsewhere in the north, which, of course, is where industrial capitalism started.

hundreds of years ago. And what, as I started to look into it more, I realized that, you know, this place that had been the birthplace of industrial capitalism is now a place grappling with what can and should come after industrial capitalism in the context of today's poly crisis around climate and biodiversity, but also economic decline and experiences of precarity and loneliness and

And it turns out that part of how some people are grappling with this poly crisis is through planting and protecting trees. And so I've been doing work up in the Manchester and greater northern England region on tree planting. So kind of continuing this human tree relationship, research on human tree relationships, but in a very different context.

Well, very interesting. But then also a bit of a step out of the zone of interest you've had in Aki, if I understood right, more of an individual relationship of people with trees. So I guess less state projects and more community? Definitely.

More community, but the state is there as well. You know, there's a lot of funding coming from the UK government to to plant trees. And so it's it's there, but it's the state is there. But yeah, maybe the focus of my ethnographic attention thus far, at least, has been on the people who are actually planting and protecting trees.

All right. Thank you so much. Thank you for all these interesting insights. I hope we tempted some listeners to pick up your book. I can wholeheartedly say they should. I can recommend it. I had a great time reading your ethnography, Forest Lost, Producing Green Capitalism in the Brazilian Amazon, published 2024 by Duke University Press.

And I'm very much looking forward to your future work. Thank you so much. Thanks so much for having me and for taking the time to read the book and ask me such insightful questions. I appreciate it.