Mounting concern over climate change highlights the fundamental conflict between economic expansion and a finite environment (Jackson, 2009). The implications of this tension are profound. Yet an increasingly common response is to further incorporate the environment within market capitalism. As noted earlier for instance, the UK government recently initiated an ‘Ecosystem Markets Task Force’ to review opportunities for the business sector to ‘value and protect nature's services’ by incorporating the environment within the market system (DEFRA, 2012). It is illustrative of a growing and disturbing trend for the environment to be accorded a market value and for corporations to be portrayed as the central institutions through which that value should be maintained.

Concepts such as ‘natural capitalism’ and ‘corporate environmentalism’ further underline the ‘business case’ for the environment through new products, markets, and forms of technological innovation. The central argument is that the environment and corporate profitability can benefit concurrently (Esty and Winston, 2006; Hawken et al., 1999; Kurucz et al., 2008). Thus through a process of commensuration the resolution of environmental problems is presented as best achieved through assigning a monetary value to nature – converting ‘different qualities into a common metric’ (Espeland and Stevens, 1998: 314).

We have already examined how environmental ‘risks’ are calculated and exchanged. This, too, demands the convenient incorporation of the environment into the market. The overriding lesson is that domains that have historically stood outside the capitalist system now find themselves, along with a much broader swath of civil society, far more susceptible to marketisation in the face of neoliberalism's continued rise (Asdal, 2008; Crouch, 2011; Fourcade, 2011; Harvey, 2005).