Another recent, excellent study that was recently indexed by Southwest Humanities, Maron E. Greenleaf’s Forest Lost: Producing Green Capitalism in the Brazilian Amazon (Duke University Press, 2025) is soon to be published—on 22 November 2025. In this insightful book, Greenleaf “explores forest carbon offsets [in order] 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.” The book demonstrates “how making forest carbon monetarily valuable created an unexpected set of uneven, contingent, and contested social and political relations,” showing that, despite the potential benefits of social inclusion, green capitalism actually shores up the kind of marginalization it is intended to stave off. For more information about this book, as well as a free sample of the introduction, please see the publisher’s website here.
SOUTHWEST HUMANITIES 