It is impossible to exaggerate the extent of this natural-capital rush, now being promoted by global speculative finance, which since the Great Financial Crisis of 2007–10 has sought to acquire real assets in the physical environment to underpin continuing debt expansion. The transmutation of so-called natural capital into tradable exchange value over the last decade is seen as opening up almost unlimited opportunities for corporations and money managers. In 2012, the Corporate EcoForum, a group of twenty-four multinational corporations including Alcoa, Coca-Cola, Dell, Disney, Dow, Duke Energy, Nike, Unilever, and Weyerhaeuser, published The New Business Imperative: Valuing Natural Capital in conjunction with the Nature Conservancy, insisting that the then “estimated $72 trillion of ‘free’ goods and services” associated with global natural capital and ecosystem services be monetized for the purpose of more sustainable growth.” The report emphasized the enormous debt “leverage” opportunities represented by “emerging natural capital markets such as water-quality trading, wetland banking and threatened species banking, and natural carbon sequestration.” As a result, it was imperative to “put a price on nature’s value,” or, stated differently, “a monetary value on what nature does for…businesses.” The future of the capitalist economy lay in ensuring that the market pay “for once-free ecosystem services,” which could thereby generate new economic value for those corporations able to convert titles to natural capital into financial assets.
