Conservation has always held that nature has intrinsic value. Value beyond use, beyond price, beyond human preference. The philosophical foundations differ, but the claim is consistent: a woodland is not merely worth what someone will pay for it.
Biodiversity credits ask us to set that aside. Not to abandon the belief, but to bracket it. To build infrastructure that makes ecosystems legible to capital, on the bet that capital flows can be redirected toward conservation outcomes. The bet is practical: intrinsic value has not been enough to stop the clearing.
Poliks and Trillo's Exocapitalism suggests this bet has a cost we have not fully reckoned. Their framework describes capital as an autonomous process that pulls toward abstraction. Every interface we build to make nature investable becomes a surface where value is generated independent of the ground. The physical substrate, the actual woodland, becomes increasingly distant from the instrument that represents it.
This is not a moral critique. It is a mechanical one. The infrastructure does not care about our intentions. Registries, verification platforms, trading systems: each layer of mediation creates friction, and friction is extractable. The recursive structure generates value through inefficiency. That is what it does, regardless of why we built it.
The deeper problem is that intrinsic value becomes incoherent once you have built the interface. You cannot simultaneously claim that a woodland has value beyond price and issue a credit that prices it. The act of measurement forecloses the claim. Not because the belief was wrong, but because the infrastructure has no capacity to represent it. Intrinsic value is not a data field.
Conservationists have long worried about commodification as a moral hazard. Exocapitalism suggests it is also a structural one. The pull toward abstraction is not a risk to be managed through good governance. It is a tendency built into the topology of the system. The same infrastructure that funds conservation can, given time, fund extraction. Not through failure, but through success: by working exactly as designed.
None of this means we should not build biodiversity credits. Capital is already in nature. The economics that make clearing rational are not waiting for our permission. But we should be precise about the trade we are making. We are exchanging a claim we could not enforce, intrinsic value, for an instrument we cannot fully control.
Call it ecocapitalism. The prefix is not a celebration. It names the tension: ecological relationships folded into capital circuits, held there by effort and governance, against a constant pull toward abstraction. The ground is where we work. The task is keeping the instruments tethered to it, knowing the tether is not a feature of the system but something we impose from outside.
The woodland does not know it has been priced. That is both the problem and, perhaps, the only comfort.