Most researchers who employ a commodification of nature framing invoke a Marxian conceptualization of commodities as "objects produced for sale on the market"[2] that embody both use and exchange value.
[4] As capitalism expands in breadth and depth, more and more things previously external to the system become “internalized,” including entities and processes that are usually considered "natural."
In England and later elsewhere, "enclosure" involved attacks upon and eventual near-elimination of the commons—a long, contested and frequently violent process Marx referred to as "primitive accumulation.
The neo-Malthusian discourse of Garrett Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons" (1968) parallels this perspective, reconceptualizing public goods as "scarce commodities" requiring either privatization or strong state control.
This is one step that many scientists and experts agree needs to happen in order to transition away from fossil fuels and delay or even prevent man-made climate change.
Deregulation of governmental programs such as the EPA, and other environmental organizations may be good for business, but it doesn't serve the people who must live on a more polluted earth.
[1]: 125, 127 Competition provides constant pressure for innovation and growth in a "restless and unstable process," making the system expansionary and "tendentially all-encompassing.
"[12] As Neil Smith argues, "[n]o part of the earth’s surface, the atmosphere, the oceans, the geological substratum, or the biological superstratum are immune from transformation by capital.
[16] A neoliberal approach constructs nature as a "world currency," valued in international markets and given "the opportunity to earn its own right to survive.
[20] Thus, neoliberal interventions like ecotourism and bioprospecting are viewed by critics as ways of forcing nature to earn its right to survive in the global marketplace.
[citation needed] The commodification of nature occurs through two distinct "moments" as capitalization "stretches" its reach to include greater distances of space and time, and "deepens" to penetrate into more types of goods and services.
[23]: 1739 [1]: 125 External nature becomes an "accumulation strategy" for capital, through traditional examples like mining and agriculture as well as new "commodity frontiers" in bioprospecting and ecotourism.
David Harvey sees this as "the wholesale commodification of nature in all its forms," a "new wave of ‘enclosing the commons’"[24] that employs environmentalism in the service of the rapid expansion of capitalism.
[26] At the most abstract level, commodification is a process through which qualitatively different things are made equivalent and exchangeable through the medium of money.
[4]: 278–9 Commodification turns on this apparent dissolution of qualitative difference and its “renegotiation,” as commodities are standardized in order to maintain a constant identity across space and time.
[1]: 126 Noel Castree stresses that commodification in fact involves several interrelated aspects, or "relational moments," that should not be confused or conflated as they can be employed independently of each other.
[4]: 281 [3]: 1231 Through functional abstraction, "wetlands" are constructed as a generic category despite the uniqueness of physical sites[4]: 281 [32] and different gasses and activities are equated through carbon markets.
Monetization is thus foundational to capitalism, rendering things commensurable and exchangeable, allowing for the separation of production, circulation and consumption over great gulfs of time and space.
The qualitative differences of a heterogeneous biophysical world are seen to be analytically and practically significant, sources of unpredictability and resistance to human intention that also shape and provide opportunities for capital circulation and accumulation.
[4][36] The tangible non-human world thus affects the construction of social and economic relations and practice, inscribing ecology in the dynamics of capital.
Markets generally deal poorly with issues of procedural fairness and equitable distribution, and critics see commodification as producing greater levels of inequality in power and participation while reinforcing existing vulnerabilities.
[45] Through commodification, natural entities and services become vehicles for the realization of profit,[46] subject to the pressures of the market where efficiency overrides other concerns.
[48] Market exchange is "reason-blind,"[49] but without rational assessment of different strategies and the ecological importance of particular natural entities, commodification cannot effectively deliver on conservation.
As governments and private firms seek to maximize carbon content for emissions markets, they invest preferably in tree plantations over complex forest ecosystems, eliminating species diversity, density and resulting in domino effects on processes such as water flow.
[53] This reductionism leads to an inefficiency in promoting biodiversity since as ecosystems are simplified into more basic commodities they can no longer support as diverse a set of organisms as they could pre-commodification.
Capitalist penetration into natural commodities can never be complete, because a certain amount of production, by definition, takes place prior to human intervention.
[70] Protest movements, transnational coalitions, instances of alternative practices and counter-discourses all fall within a broad tent of resistance struggles to "reclaim the commons.