The Urban Forest

The Urban Forest: Chapter 5 explores forest valorization, and green capitalism more widely, as a cultural project. Efforts to make the forest culturally valuable were entangled with those to make it monetarily valuable in ways that reshaped the Acrean capital city and the lives of some of its residents. This urban forest, as the chapter explores it, sought to include the forest and forest people in the dominant culture, with the aim of transforming that culture in the process. Many urban residents benefited from this cultural valorization, forest-themed public space and culture, and secure middle-class employment governing the forest from the city. Yet rural poverty and marginalization continued. The chapter elucidates how the limitations and contradictions of the forest’s cultural valorization undermined green capitalism.