Climate Change, with Professor Maron Greenleaf

The Sydcast

Episode Summary

Climate change is here, from wildfires to hurricanes and a gradual rise in temperatures. Carbon offsets have become prominent weapons in the war against climate change, but what does it really mean in practice? And on the ground in Brazil? Maron Greenleaf is an anthropologist studying these very questions. What is she learning about the economics, science, and politics that underpin the battle for global sustainability?

Sydney Finkelstein

Syd Finkelstein is the Steven Roth Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. He holds a Master’s degree from the London School of Economics and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Professor Finkelstein has published 25 books and 90 articles, including the bestsellers Why Smart Executives Fail and Superbosses: How Exceptional Leaders Master the Flow of Talent, which LinkedIn Chairman Reid Hoffman calls the “leadership guide for the Networked Age.” He is also a Fellow of the Academy of Management, a consultant and speaker to leading companies around the world, and a top 25 on the Global Thinkers 50 list of top management gurus. Professor Finkelstein’s research and consulting work often relies on in-depth and personal interviews with hundreds of people, an experience that led him to create and host his own podcast, The Sydcast, to uncover and share the stories of all sorts of fascinating people in business, sports, entertainment, politics, academia, and everyday life.

Maron Greenleaf

Maron Greenleaf is a sociocultural anthropologist, political ecologist, and legal scholar studying climate change, forests, and green economies. Maron is completing an ethnographic book manuscript on carbon offsets in the Brazilian Amazon and is starting new research on reforestation in post-industrial England. She also co-founded Dartmouth’s Energy Justice Clinic, where she works with community partners and Dartmouth students to understand and support socially just transitions to renewable energy. Maron holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Stanford University, a JD from New York University, and a BA in Political Science from Yale University. She is an Assistant Professor in Dartmouth College’s Department of Anthropology.

Insights from this episode:

• Maron becoming a professor
• Maron’s Buddhist practice and how it helped spark interest in sustainability
• Maron’s life growing up
• Growing up in a Buddhist home in America
• Developing interest in anthropology
• Insights into carbon offsets
• Maron’s work in Brazil
• Concerns of creating concerns

Quotes from the show:

• “I went to law school with the intention of studying carbon markets, and how markets and law could address this looming crisis” —Maron Greenleaf [8:38]
• “One thing my parents taught me, I think this does come from the Buddhist tradition, is that boredom is okay. It’s okay to be bored and out of boredom comes a lot of creativity and self-sufficiency” —Maron Greenleaf [11:45]
• “It was (Buddhist practice) very nurturing and the kind of basic teaching was that everyone is basically good, but there’s inherent desire to live a good life” —Maron Greenleaf [12:34]
• “One way for a company to reduce or eliminate their emissions is through, actually, polluting less, but another way is through buying offsets so that other people pollute less” —Maron Greenleaf [25:27]
• “Forests are not empty of people, even though they are often imagined to be. In fact, hundreds of millions of people are connected to tropical forests” —Maron Greenleaf [31:42]
• “They (Brazilians and their ancestors) spent a lot of time in the forest, and so, they understand that the forests can be very valuable economically: so they don’t really want to deforest, but that’s the only way that they have been able to make money” —Maron Greenleaf [41:36]
• “That book is an account of what I have been talking about. It’s not optimistic in a lot of ways, but I think understanding the way the efforts to create green economies have worked so far, their limitations, but also their successes (…) I think that can help inform the measures that are going to be taken in the future” —Maron Greenleaf [43:20]

Stay connected:

Sydney Finkelstein

Website: http://thesydcast.com

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Twitter: @sydfinkelstein

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Maron Greenleaf

Website: Maron Greenleaf – Anthropology and Environment Society

Twitter: Maron Greenleaf

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This episode was produced and managed by Podcast Laundry.