Carbon Boom: Chapter 1 analyzes a key component of the effort to make Acrean forest carbon valuable: Acrean rubber history and its retelling. It also presents key components of Acrean history: the rubber boom, the development of the famed rubber tapper social movement, and subsequent state government administrations that sometimes promoted a forest-protective form of economic development. It shows how, as part of this latter effort, the story of rubber helped to make the Acrean forest a potentially valuable source of carbon offsets for international buyers in places like California, almost leading to a forest carbon boom in the state. Elucidating green capitalism, the chapter traces how the materiality of forest carbon and other new environmental commodities can militate for stories of social inclusion and stability that contrast with the stories often told about extractive frontiers. Yet these inclusive stories contain their own form of standardization, and their own omissions.
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