The wilderness fetish: The mystification of nature conservation in the age of capital

Abstract

Recent proposals for large-scale nature conservation, such as Half-Earth (Socialism) or the 30 × 30 agenda, rely on a distorted notion of nature as a pristine realm untouched by human influence. This idea, which we term the ‘wilderness fetish’, builds on the historically produced separation of nature and society central to capitalist modes of accumulation. In upholding a moral and aesthetic ideal of untouched nature, the wilderness fetish conceals the material and social relations involved in the production and conservation of ‘the wild’ and its own socio-historical genesis. We argue that the wilderness fetish gained traction at the precise moment when the search for capitalist solutions to the capitalogenic crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, and ecological degradation intensified.

Drawing on Marx's concept of the commodity fetish, we theorise the wilderness fetish as a category of both moral and economic value. It is inspired by, and complementary to, the concept of commodity fetishism, but takes shape in the domain of conservation. Under conditions of late capitalism, wilderness is produced and valorised, while simultaneously playing a pivotal role in ideological and material reproduction. Capitalism and conservation are deeply entangled by a fetishistic logic. Therefore, we foreground the importance of pursuing qualitative, rather than merely quantitative, changes to enable genuine social-ecological transformations for the future.

[…] nature, the nature that preceded human history […] is nature which today no longer exists anywhere (except perhaps on a few Australian coral islands of recent origin) ….

(Marx and Engels: The German Ideology, 1976 [1845]: 40)

Introduction

Nature conservation is a critical arena for negotiating alternatives to climate emergency and rapid biodiversity loss. Advocates typically frame themselves as ecocentrists or sociocentrists. The latter are neo-conservationists who argue against limiting conservation to a few reserves, and, instead, aim to mainstream it (Marris, 2013). For instance, Büscher and Fletcher (2020, 2023) have suggested “convivial conservation” as a critical political-ecological approach to conservation and capital. In contrast, the ecocentrists advocate for a resurgence of neoprotectionist “fortress conservation” (Brockington, 2002) approaches, epitomised by the Half-Earth notion (Wilson, 2016) and its recent socialist reinterpretation, Half-Earth Socialism (Vettese and Pendergrass, 2022). Despite the socialist framing, we suspect that Half-Earth (Socialism)—hereafter, HE(S)—cannot be a solution. It exemplifies what Büscher (2024: 3) describes as “the great conservation tragedy,” a dialectical cycle in which each round of protection that fails to stop the global biodiversity loss “inspires a new, transmogrified round of neoprotectionist thinking.”

In this contribution, we critically explore one shortcoming of such neoprotectionist endeavours: the problematic idea of wilderness—nature untouched by humans. While the emphasis has slightly shifted from wilderness to conservation, recent debates around HE(S) and similar proposals recall the ‘great wilderness debate’ (Petersen and Hultgren, 2020) and its fundamental Man-nature dichotomy (Minteer and Miller, 2011; Miller, Minteer and Malan, 2011). However, many critiques of HE(S) approaches and the notion of ‘wilderness’ in general fail to consider why wilderness is a fundamentally problematic category, based on skewed, westernised notions of, and longing for, sublime extra-human nature (Latour, 1993). We call this the ‘wilderness fetish,’ an extension of Marx's concept of the commodity fetish. This fetish might explain “the sustained appeal of the protectionist ideas” (Büscher, 2024: 3) in light of ever more threatening manifestations of biodiversity loss and climate change. ¹ The idea of wilderness as a sublime realm has been variously described as fetishistic (Cronon, 1996a, 1996b; Northcott, 2005; Recarte, 2011; Churchill, 2014; Vogel, 2015; Greiner and Bollig, 2023; Lobo, 2023). However, a thorough conceptual engagement with wilderness as a fetish form is still pending.

In what follows, we briefly elaborate on recent HE(S) approaches and some of the criticism they have sparked (Section 2). This is followed by an outline of the relation between moral and economic value in wilderness (Section 3). We then revisit the Marxian notion of the commodity fetish (Section 4) to set the scene for our exploration into how wilderness can be understood as fetishistic in a value-theoretical, historical-materialist sense (Section 5). We conclude with a summarising discussion of the wilderness fetish and why HE(S) proposals are deeply problematic (Section 6).

Half-Earth (Socialism) and its critics

Debates rage on about how to value and protect nature at the dawn of the Anthropocene (Adams, 2017; Brown, 2019; Büscher, 2024; Büscher and Fletcher, 2020; Immovilli and Kok, 2020; Kiwango and Mabele, 2022; Schleicher et al., 2019; Sène, 2024). These conversations are of utmost importance in our current historical conjuncture characterised by profound anxieties about climate change, a sixth mass extinction, habitat loss and pollution (Chakrabarty, 2009). A growing number of conservationists have called for more radical efforts in rewilding, with one of the most prominent being proponents of the “half-earth” (Wilson, 2016) hypothesis. ² Conservation biologist E. O. Wilson argues that half of the planet's surface should be committed to nature to save biodiversity. Based on a biomathematical extrapolation of island biogeography theory, he suggests that this amount of the planet's surface is needed to stabilise 80% of species. Under this plan, “pristine and wild areas” would be strictly separated from zones of human activity (Immovilli and Kok, 2020: 16). Wilson's vision subscribes to what he calls “ecological realism” (Wilson, 2016: 153), technological innovation and green capitalism. He says little about the fate of the people currently living in the vast areas to be conserved (Ellis and Mehrabi, 2019: 23), ³ but the implications of his argument are revealed when he describes future human interactions with the proposed reserves. Wilson writes, “People would still visit any reserve in the world physically, but they could also travel there virtually […]. Perhaps a Serengeti Waterhole at dawn?” (Wilson, 2016: 152). This recalls a classic imaginary of ‘wilderness’ in which (white) humans are mere spectators. The ambitious Half-Earth goal is now under discussion in the UN's Convention on Biological Diversity (Ellis and Mehrabi, 2019).

Vettesse and Pendegrass (2022) do not evoke such imaginaries in their call for a Half-Earth Socialism. They expressly distance themselves from such overt colonial overtones, but follow Wilson in assuming that about half of the earth (without saying where) should be reserved for nature to prevent the sixth mass extinction and save the planet. To achieve this ambitious goal, they suggest socialist planning, global veganism, a consistent implementation of renewable energy supply and, most importantly for our purposes, rewilding. By this, the authors mean restoration of forests, grasslands and “the return of wild animals to these ecosystems” (2022: 79). They also suggest a rewilding of the mind by “disentangling human consciousness from self-willed nature” (54).

These radical conservation ideas have been critiqued for their incubation in the Global North without consultation from Indigenous or local communities (Kothari, 2021: 161). While HE protagonists and Indigenous populations may agree that we need a more ethical relationship with our environment, this closeness, Kothari argues, is “somewhat superficial” (2021: 161). Ajl and Wallace (2021) go further, arguing that the proposals would intensify the exploitation of the rural by the urban and entail the large-scale dispossession of people with pastoralist or small-scale farming lifestyles. Napoletano and Clark lament “fixes of dubious efficacy most burdensome to those least responsible” for the loss of biodiversity (2020: 44). Similarly, Kiwango and Mabele remind us that large-scale conservation efforts in the Global South continue “institutional path dependencies that arose under European colonial rule” (2022: 181).

Critics contend that placing half of the planet's land surface under conservation would, amongst other things, not only significantly undermine the agricultural production necessary to feed growing populations, but also reinforce the global land rush (Ellis and Mehrabi, 2019). The proposals raise broader questions of distributional justice (Wienhues, 2018), including why humanity as a whole should be held accountable for the damage instead of those profiting from the exploitation of nature (Kopnina, 2016).

At their core, HE and the official “30 by 30” agenda of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework ⁴ are top-down expressions of a hegemonic, capitalistic “environmentalism of the rich” (Dauvergne, 2016) that lack any clear notion of democracy (Ahern, 2022; Carlsson, 2022). Such approaches, as Napoletano and Clark (2020: 41) observe, set a “narrow focus on the so-called immediate drivers of habitat loss” without changing the systemic political and economic drivers that have caused the problems in the first place (see also: Büscher, 2024). This fixation on the immediate appearance strongly points toward the wilderness fetish as a root of the problem.

Wilderness as a moral-economic value

Following Immovilli and Kok (2020), we argue that HE(S) approaches explicitly rely on the notion of wilderness, in which both senses of ‘value’—moral and economic—overlap. Most importantly, bourgeois notions of wilderness (and its conservation) ignore basic, underlying sociocultural productive forces. We illustrate how wilderness—or total ‘untouchedness-by-humans’—is an inverse but dependent side of environmental plunder. Writing in 1962, Alfred Schmidt aptly explained:

Precisely because nature confronts men exclusively as an object to be exploited, the glorification of nature assumes an implicitly false and ideological character when it is, for once, not viewed from the angle of economic benefit, as for example on a coach tour. If nature ceased to serve merely as raw material, it would no longer need idolization (Schmidt, 1971 [1962]: 154).

Any kind of ‘conservation’ seems to presuppose that which it seeks to counteract: extraction, devaluation and exhaustion. As Büscher and Fletcher (2020) argue in their call for a more radical position in the new conservation debate, neither ‘neoprotectionists’ nor ‘new conservationists’ take the force of capitalism seriously enough. A structural driver of the environmental crisis is the capital principle, put forward as the second contradiction of capitalism (O’Connor, 1988, 1991; Gerber, 2025): infinitely accelerating, exchange-value-driven accumulation and extraction in a finite world.

The notion of wilderness, however, is older than capitalist society and draws much of its meaning from earlier historical periods (Groh and Groh, 1991; Cronon, 1996b). For most of history, its lack of economic value created a morally negative connotation (‘wasteland’). The onset of the Industrial Revolution saw a fundamental, positive moral revaluation of wilderness: the economic fact of environmental plunder fuelling industrialisation meant that untouched places were becoming fewer and increasingly worth protecting. It is only with the recent environmental crisis that capital's undermining of its own material conditions has become so severe that the moral valuation of wilderness as being of value in itself converges with economic valorisation and attendant ‘Green New Deals’ (Greiner and Bollig, 2023).

According to Cronon (1996a), the wilderness idea draws from two main historical sources: the European notion of the sublime in nature and the American notion of the Frontier. An idealising notion of wilderness as the sublime has been in continuous circulation since the Renaissance, reaching its apex with nineteenth-century Romanticism (Groh and Groh, 1991). Since then, the increasing moral-ethical valorisation of wilderness has gone hand in hand with its economic devaluation: cheap extraction and continuous over-use fuelled successive waves of primitive accumulation. Wilderness as an existing space of nature, as Western audiences like to imagine, dates back to 1883 and the establishment of Yellowstone National Park. At this moment, the Frontier—so central to the American experience—was largely closed, and Native Americans were resettled on reservations.

The idealised ‘wild’, as a realm of untouched pristineness, can be traced to the Industrial Revolution, colonisation and plunder. Wilderness conservation areas emerged as sites of ‘civilisational longing’ for the pristine, as places to escape and sources of physical health and moral value, distant from the misery of industrialised urban centres (Cronon 1996b). Such protected wilderness has often been referred to as “fortress conservation” (Brockington, 2002), as it excluded Indigenous populations who used and shaped the ecosystems. Indigenous people were, and often still are, the first victims of such imposed conceptions of wilderness (Neumann, 1992; Dowie, 2001; Steinhart, 2006). Consequently, they were also among the first critics, as the Lakota Chief, Luther Standing Bear, stated: “Only to the white man was nature a ‘wilderness’” (Standing Bear 1998 [1933]: 201).

Post-WW2 conservation efforts were largely seen as ‘anti-business’ efforts to protect ‘pristine’ nature and charismatic megafauna from capitalist expansion (Walpole and Leader-Williams, 2002; Brockington et al., 2008; Macekura, 2015). Wilderness was seen to counterbalance valorisation. However, with neoliberalism in the 1980s, conservation shifted from protection from commodification to protection through commodification (Igoe and Brockington, 2007). Growing concerns over climate change and biodiversity loss have further fuelled ecological restoration and rewilding efforts, turning wilderness into an increasingly commodified trope (Greiner and Bollig, 2023).

In the ‘great new wilderness debate’ (Callicott and Nelson, 1998; Nelson and Callicott, 2008; Petersen and Hultgren, 2020), wilderness realists, including deep ecologists, view wilderness as a relic to be protected from human invasion (Petersen and Hultgren, 2020: 2). Constructivists, in contrast, see it as a cultural construct, a value-laden ideal. Marx and Engels recognised that a ‘first nature’ outside human interference no longer exists (prescient of recent debates on the Anthropocene). An intermediate position acknowledges nature's autonomy, while recognising its social mediation (Cronon, 1996b; Malm, 2018). As Cronon puts it, despite all the “trouble with wilderness,” it is “no less crucial for us to recognize and honor nonhuman nature as a world we did not create, a world with its own independent, nonhuman reasons for being as it is” (1996b: 22).

We agree with Cronon (1996b) in recognising nature's complex, dynamic and sometimes unpredictable autonomy (Wynne-Jones et al., 2020). In line with a cybernetic perspective, a homeostatic or homeorhesis status of nature based on the autonomous interaction of biosphere, atmosphere, oceans and soils (Lovelock 2016), is not improved through more ‘fixing’ anthropogenic influences on ecogenerative processes (Costanza et al., 1997), planetary boundaries (Richardson et al., 2023), and local ecosystems (Scheffer et al., 2001), but the acknowledgement of existing human-nature entanglements. Marris's idea of an everyday wilderness—a “background nature” (2013: 135) that relinquishes its ‘pristineness’—illustrates how such an approach could be implemented. Tsing also attends to feral ways of life (Bubandt and Tsing, 2023) that persist and regenerate within capitalist ruins but not of them (Tsing, 2015). Both ideas redirect the gaze from an outward fascination with the ‘other’ to an inward reflection on the genealogy and transformative potential of the ordinary, from the creation of idealised natures to the cultivation of existing relations with nature.

Nonetheless, the cultural understanding of wilderness and associated environmentalism developed in the West, particularly in the US, sees ‘wilderness’ as a predestined place of heightened sensual experience, as civilisation's necessary other (e.g., consider the nature-writings of Aldo Leopold, Henry David Thoreau and others). As Guha (2017) sharply argues, this notion is based on a paradoxical construct rooted in the parallel worlds of deep ecology and unquestioned mass consumption. At least in the case of US national parks, enjoyment of wilderness is perfectly compatible with the “private automobile and the life style it has spawned” (Guha, 2017: 416). A similar argument has been made for South African national parks, highlighting the paradoxical reliance of wilderness experiences on fossil-dependent infrastructure (Büscher et al., 2024).

In this sense, the concern with wilderness was an effect of the town/country divide, a crucial historical and value-theoretical juncture (Foster, 1999; Moore, 2011): “Cities are the origin of the wilderness fetish in the first place” (Lobo, 2023: 370). Cronon (1996b) sees the concern as peculiarly urban-elitist and consumptive, detached from the lived realities of people working the land, regardless of whether this work is carried out in the countryside or in the ‘wild’ parks of the city (Parish, 2019). This suggests a notion of wilderness based on the alienation brought about by the town/countryside divide, a social differential that is profitably exploited for accumulation. The desire for wilderness is commodified through adventure gear, survival books, and media that romanticise it as a space for personal renewal and escape from modernity. In the Anthropocene, where wilderness is becoming a “relic of the past” (Petersen and Hultgren, 2020: 4), demand is booming, but remains largely overlooked in academic debates.

Throughout capitalism's history, wilderness has been increasingly morally and romantically valorised as the exact inverse of increasing environmental plunder and the economic devaluation (the “free gift” as it were [Marx, 1976 [1867]: 451]). Only today, as global environmental change increasingly pressures capital itself, the moral valuation of wilderness coincides with its economic valuation, if inconveniently. We now turn to Marx's concept of the commodity fetish.

Marx's notion of the commodity fetish

At the age of 24, Marx, a journalist and editor at the Rheinische Zeitung, used the fetish concept in Debates on the Law on Theft of Wood (1842), four articles on the proposed ban on the collection of “dry fallen wood” (Marx, 2010 [1842]: 225). The privatisation of wood would strip the poor of a vital resource. Marx applied the colonial concept, which had been used to ethnologically justify the subjugation of ‘foreign peoples’, to his own bourgeois society to reflect his own mysticism. Marx condemns those prioritising “private interests” over the common good, accusing them of fetishising wood (Marx, 2010 [1842]: 262). He critiques how commodification turns “wooden idols” into objects of worship, where “human beings are sacrificed!” (Marx, 2010 [1842]: 226), thus formulating an early critique of ‘reification,’ that is, the mediation of social relations by objects.

In a commodity-producing society, things are produced for the market, where their value is realised. This happens under two conditions: (a) they have a utility (use value) and (b) a value is attributed to them, making them comparable and interchangeable (exchange value). According to Marx (1976 [1867]), in a capitalist society, exchange value is the necessary expression of value, and an average value is determined by the socially necessary labour time. However, concrete human labour, not abstract labour, is what physically creates things. Yet, we do not perceive commodities in the market as products of human labour; they are abstract values that can be bought and sold through the general medium of exchange, money. In this process, exchange value seems like a natural property of the thing, but it is “a supra-natural property: their value, which is something purely social” (Marx, 1976 [1867]: 149). The division of labour in commodity production is realised only through exchange, so value emerges at the moment of circulation.

Producers interact as isolated individuals through their products, not as organising subjects—their relation is reified. It is not the needs of people that dictate the production process, but the law of value, mediated through the commodity form. While labour and the products of labour seem natural, they are socially mediated. Marx defines exchange value as the determining principle dictated by the commodity form, which dominates people as an abstraction, conceptualised as “anonymous domination” (Elbe, 2017), “domination without subject” (Kurz, 1993) or “mute compulsion” (Marx, 1976 [1867]: 899; elaborated by Mau, 2023). Thus, the fetish of the commodity derives its power from the act of abstraction that is only effective because people believe in it and act accordingly (Marx, 1976 [1867]: 165).

The fetish character, tied to the commodity form, is both an objective “elementary form” of wealth (Marx, 1976 [1867]: 125) and a social principle realised through subjects’ actions. It exists through social practice while remaining an objective fact—a crucial tension in analyses of the wilderness fetish. There is a broad tradition that seeks to strip the commodity of its mystical “veil” (Marx, 1976 [1867]: 173) by revealing the processes of production and labour that it embodies. For instance, Harvey argues that “We have to get behind the veil, the fetishism of the market and the commodity, in order to tell the full story of social reproduction” (Harvey, 1990: 422). Yet, the fetish character is not merely an “illusion” (Althusser et al., 2016: 259) or a form of distorted consciousness but a productive principle. People do not merely seem to be controlled by things; they are indeed controlled by them. They do not merely seem to relate to each other through this material relationship; they actually relate only through it. If fetishism is inherent to the commodity form, it cannot be removed without eliminating commodities from circulation and capitalism itself. Doing so would undoubtedly disgruntle the producers, as failing to realise the potential exchange value would deprive them of the money required for their reproduction. Thus, the ‘veil’ is not just ideological but fundamental to capitalism (Best, 2024). Harvey reduces fetishism to naturalisation, underemphasizing reification; yet, fetishism is intrinsic to the commodity form, producing “[…] a social relation between objects, a relation which exists apart from and outside the producers” (Marx, 1976 [1867]: 165).

The fetish, as something that produces consciousness, operates through the subjects. At the same time, the production of value and its realisation occur through commodities, whose laws of motion are objectively comprehensible as an “automatic subject” (Marx, 1976 [1867]: 255). Needs are essential for value realisation, but increasingly shaped by marketing, as illustrated by the famous “spectacle” (Debord, 2012 [1967]) and the “culture industry” (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002 [1944]). The categories of perception of the commodity world are themselves determined by the commodity (Biro, 2011). The instinctual desire for commodities causes the rule of capital to descend to the biological level (Biro, 2011). Capitalism inscribes itself into biology and becomes part of human nature. Adorno (1973) formulates that the fetish not only determines the economic sphere, but also produces consciousness, so that “[i]n the spell [of the commodity], the reified consciousness has become total” (346). Lukács writes:

That is to say, the problem of commodities must not be considered in isolation or even regarded as the central problem in economics, but as the central, structural problem of capitalist society in all its aspects. Only in this case can the structure of commodity-relations be made to yield a model of all the objective forms of bourgeois society together with all the subjective forms corresponding to them. (Lukács, 1971 [1923]: 83)

Contemporary thinkers also note that capitalism is not merely an economic system but a far-reaching phenomenon that co-produces “non-economic conditions of possibility” (Fraser, 2021: 99, italics in original, see also Moore, 2015b). This means that capitalism not only shapes economic subjects and processes but also determines both human and non-human nature, “internal and external nature” (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 24), first and second nature, ideological and material conditions of its existence—crossing the border between society and nature. In this sense, capitalism “is not an economic system; it is not a social system; it is a way of organizing nature” (Moore, 2015a: 2, italics in original).

Much has been written about the capitalist exploitation of nature and the appropriation of its qualities only to transform them into abstract values, the dangers of its commodification, the rift that this extraction tears in the metabolic cycle (Gerber, 2025; Saito, 2017; Foster, 1999), the imbalance and the simple contradictions that one encounters when infinite and necessary growth meets limited resources (Kallis 2018). Here, we deal with the flipside of the whole—the ‘wilderness’, or the idea of ‘untouched nature’ under capitalist conditions.

The wilderness fetish

The wilderness fetish relies on the capitalist idea of nature as a non-human resource and represents a certain idealising fixation on its supposed appearance, often in protected areas. It locates nature's value in nature itself while obscuring the social relationships that constitute those appearances. Nevertheless, the perception and valuation of wilderness, often idealised as ‘nature untouched by humans,’ are historically determined processes.

Lobo draws an analogy between art and wilderness, as both present themselves to humans as a seemingly “external” entity (Lobo, 2023: 375), with art shaping the wilderness into a “fetishized, idealized” form through the “picturesque” (369). Consequently, “natural beauty” can only ever be seen as something artificial, as “images,” and never as an “object of action” (Adorno, 1997: 65). The aesthetic relationship to wilderness remains contemplative. However, the fetish cannot be reduced to the subjective-aesthetic appearance of wilderness; it is not a ‘false’ perception of a ‘correct’ reality, but is itself reality-producing. The natural beauty of wilderness is its subjective perception. The materialisation of this beauty in national parks is part of the objectification of social relations.

Like commodity fetishism, it cannot be ‘defetishised’ through enlightenment. Instead, this aesthetic materialises in the world as a “real abstraction” (Sohn-Rethel, 1978: 20). The wilderness is, therefore, also subject to a process of transformation in accordance with prevailing notions of natural beauty. Igoe's research demonstrates that the concept of wilderness, as understood in the Western context, is imported into the Global South (Igoe, 2010; 2021) and shaped by large international NGOs and the growth of ecotourism (see e.g., Kleinod-Freudenberg, 2025). These influences significantly affect the physical landscape and the ontology of living beings to satisfy the reified consciousness of tourists, creating Wilson's (2016: 152) aforementioned “Serengeti waterhole[s] at dawn.” The commodification of wilderness as a consumable ‘spectacle’ presupposes a process of working these areas. The sociality implied in the landscapes being fenced off as wilderness areas is not necessarily or simply forgotten by the proponents of conservation. Wilderness, at least in many parts of the Global South, often practically means appropriation, primitive accumulation and proletarianisation (Arango Vásquez, 2024; Séne, 2023; Garland, 2008; Sullivan, 2013). It paves the way for green grabbing (Fairhead, Leach and Scoones, 2012; Franco and Borras, 2019).

This is exemplified by the issue of CO₂ emissions trading, which showcases the interplay between the fetishism of the commodity and that of wilderness. It perhaps most clearly “signifies how deeply capitalism has been ostensibly greened, but also how environmental policy increasingly embraces rather than resists enclosure and commodification” (Prudham, 2013: 1570). Land destined to become ‘pure’ wilderness as part of CO₂ certificate trading is characterised by expulsions. ⁵ The wilderness fetish drives this devaluation of the labour previously invested in producing certain landscapes slated for conservation. Consequently, this returns us to the issue of economic value. Nature is, on the one hand, an economic resource and, on the other, the regenerative condition of biological existence. It appears as a resource to be worked upon, exploitable and bearing potential for exchange value. At the same time, it constitutes the regeneration of value, or, put differently, the sphere of natural reproduction.

Nature is both abstract and concretely mediated by society. It does not exist outside capitalism, as it necessarily fulfils a reproductive function that capitalism can scarcely undertake on its own (Costanza et al., 1997). However, eco-regenerative aspects are rendered economically invisible as they are outside the process of value creation. This quality only becomes visible when it is quantitatively valorised, like in nature reserves or national parks, where reproductive nature assumes the commodity form through CO₂ certificates or ecotourism. Huff and Brock (2023) have recently described the capital-led utilisation of reparative processes under technological-instrumental primacy as “accumulation by restoration.” Regenerative components of nature appear as tangible objects but are simultaneously value-based abstractions of nature. Their ideal is presented as liberated from the social activities that once surrounded them. This makes nature seem interchangeable and devoid of quality.

The “capitalist machine” (Rosa et al., 2017: 56) naturalises this process by quantifying nature, making it measurable (Engster, 2020; Kolinjivadi et al., 2019). The totality of capitalism subjects nature to its logic, even where it is not commodified, so nature can only be understood through the capital relation. The idea of an ‘exchangeability’/equivalence of emissions/destructive modes of production and tree plantations/nature reserves is nothing more than the division of nature into sensual and abstract, as we have already observed with the commodity. Sensual nature is the objective natural form of nature that can be experienced in nature reserves, but its quantitative abstraction is entirely social. Here, nature has already assumed the commodity form and been divided into use value and exchange value.

Use value resides in its sensual-concrete nature and constitutes both the foundation of human livelihood and the material basis of reproduction, which is contrasted with exchange value. This inversion of sensual-concrete nature and abstract-unspecific nature points to the fetish character of nature. Even in places where nature seems to escape or oppose the “appropriating machine” (Rosa et al., 2017: 62), it remains quantified. Under a logic of exchangeability, the nature reserve becomes an “alibi” (Adorno, 1973: 68) for violent appropriations of nature elsewhere. This is a historically specific form of the quantification of nature, a “historical nature” (Moore, 2015a), that can only occur in the exchange value–producing society.

Moore extends Marx's concept of value creation through labour exploitation to include value extraction from nature. “Abstract social nature” (Moore, 2015b; 2018) enters production as “cheap nature” and ecological regeneration functions as “unpaid extra-human work” (Moore, 2015b)—a nod to feminist discourses on unpaid reproductive labour (Moore, 2018), which traditionally count as “‘part of nature’, not work” (von Essen et al., 2025: 501). According to Moore, all value production is based on the quantum of unpaid labour necessary for the reproduction of labour power. This exists outside the commodity form but is essential for value production: “its condition is the availability of a sufficiently large mass of uncommodified nature” (Moore, 2015b: 4).

Regeneration refers not only to directly economically exploitable resources (like food or timber) but also to climate regulation, biodiversity, etc. Under the economic exhaustion of natural resources, this regenerative dimension is ‘split off’, as Roswitha Scholz (2000) aptly formulated with her ‘value-splitting theory’ (Wertabspaltungstheorem). Scholz claims that value-splitting, as a form principle, permeates all areas of society, underpinning the concealed background of the valorisation process. This primacy of valorisation not only obscures the social relations in ‘wilderness’ but also its function for the regeneration of capital. The objective values of nature appear as mere products of human labour. This tendency is further intensified when regeneration is outsourced to supposedly ‘anti-capitalist’ areas (as in 30:30 or HE(S)). Many approaches fall into the trap of imagining nature only in dualistic terms: production in the human sphere is based on invisible reproduction in the ‘wild’ sphere.

But what is wrong with wilderness, if it is to compensate for environmental destruction elsewhere? As Vettese and Pendergrass (2022) argue, it becomes a problem when the aim is to oppose capital valorisation. Nature reserves are not counter-concepts; they are part of the capitalist logic. By presenting the objectified nature within them as wilderness, they cloak themselves in a ‘mystical veil’ that obscures (a) their socio-economic function, (b) the labour objectified within them, (c) their historicity, and (d) the regenerative counterpart of the production sphere. In short, the nature to be protected appears disconnected from the social constellations in which it is embedded.

We have already seen that commodity fetishism consists mainly of naturalisation and reification. Naturalisation is evident in how the social dimensions of created/protected wilderness are obscured. Reification operates on two levels: through the reified consciousness of individuals and the mediation of social relations. Even where wilderness has not yet been subjected to the dictates of exchange value, it still fits into an exchange relationship with its counterpart. Through naturalisation and reification, wilderness becomes a “fetish against commodity fetishism” (Jarvis, 1998: 117)—the supposed counter-concept aligns itself with the interests of capital.

However, under capitalist conditions, this separation between economic exploitation and material reproduction is not clearly separable (and as Nancy Fraser (2023) argues, the former increasingly penetrates the latter). While conservation projects claim to protect both humans and nature, under the increasing pressure of capital interests, they often serve as gateways for displacement, big game hunting, and illegal resource allocation. Büscher and Duffy critique contemporary international conservation:

If there is anything that defines the history of mainstream conservation it is the steady rise of protected areas, covering about 2% of the globe in the 1960s to around 17% now. This progress was incredibly difficult, and still created many ineffective “paper parks” where species are protected from hunting and other threats in name only. Worse, it bred human rights abuses and violence as people were excluded from land that was declared off-limits. (Büscher and Duffy, 2022)

HE(S) is not a progressive demand but rather part of “mainstream environmentalist” thinking (Vettese and Pendergrass, 2022: 59). Vettese and Pendergrass's socialist framing of half-earth conducts many calculations and makes predictions, but says little about society and the relationship between humans and nature. A quantitative regulation for a qualitative problem is an insufficient solution, revealing the issue of absolutisation of nature. Their HE(S) is to the ecological question as the Kyoto Protocol is to climate change: abstracted from all qualities and reduced to quantity and interchangeability. Their renunciation-focused preaching is rooted in a mechanistic understanding of nature. For Vettese and Pendergrass, nature always exists as nature-in-itself. The social dimension of nature remains unmentioned, allowing for a depiction of Marx as a supposed lover of progress and advocate of the humanisation of nature—Prometheus incarnate (Vettese and Pendergrass, 2022: 26). ⁶ Yet, the Prometheus figure perpetuates the human-nature divide. After an otherwise convincing analysis of unleashed capital relations, the authors conclude: “After all, it has long been clear what must be done, such as switching to renewable energy, expanding nature preserves, and eating less meat” (Vettese and Pendergrass, 2022: 45). As if this alone creates an anti-capitalist counterpoint.

Even Engels criticised the naturalisation of nature as ‘vulgar materialism,’ which he saw as a mechanistic understanding of natural processes (Engels, 2001 [1886]; see also Schmidt, 1971 [1962]: 151). While the HE(S) protagonists accuse Marx of relying on a ‘techno-fix’—that is, solving ecological issues through technological progress and projects like geoengineering—they themselves engage in a ‘nature-fix’, attempting to resolve the ecological question through the creation of wilderness areas, a modern form of vulgar materialism. Instead, we argue that the goal must be to mediate nature and society, not to promote them as autonomous entities.

Marx conceptualises nature historically, meaning nothing in the world exists without its concrete specificity; everything is mutually conditioned (Schmidt, 1971 [1962]). Society and nature permeate each other without dissolving into one another. It is not about ‘getting rid of nature’ but about taking seriously nature as a social category and society as a category of nature. It requires ‘getting rid of wilderness’ as a generative principle that obscures the sociality of nature and positions it as external to humanity. Nature can only be understood as a historical product in relationship to society (who could have understood nature as a measure of CO₂ storage capacity two hundred years ago?). There is no Archimedean point, neither outside of nature nor outside of society. Constructing such a point means entering the “misty realm” (Marx, 1976 [1867]: 165) and worshipping fetishes that impose their power on humans. Rather, it is important to emphasise that nature is always socially mediated, and that human-nature relationships must be analysed in the context of capitalist commodity production. By strictly separating society and nature, HE(S) overlooks that wilderness itself is socially mediated, thereby creating a fetish. This wilderness fetish supports capitalism both in its reproduction and in its expansion.

Conclusion: The trouble with Half-Earth (Socialism)

The trouble with HE(S) is its claim to transcend existing societal nature relations while remaining bounded by the capitalistic fetish of wilderness. The root cause of the ecological crisis—capitalism—is not (thoroughly) addressed (as epitomised in HE-approaches), which sets aside the question of how the other ‘social’ half should be organised. It also means that the social is excluded and occluded by default, and with it, exactly the aspect in which possible solutions to the ecological crisis can be found. For Cronon, upholding wilderness as a remedy for the ecological crisis invites trouble as it is inextricably entwined with the motor of the crisis: accumulation and dispossession.

HE(S) and its more official twin, the “30 by 30” agenda, allows for the continuation and possibly even the intensification of dispossession and alienation central to the capitalist project. As Napoletano and Clark (2020: 44) put it, “the Half-Earth project can be seen as a sort of ‘half-critique’ of capitalism.” A fuller critique of capitalism, which implies a clear relation to capitalist value, is needed. We offer the wilderness fetish as fruitful theoretical ground to explore the crisis-ridden human-environmental relations in the age of capital. From this perspective, conservation—even where it is not directly accompanied by plunder—seems to become the inverse of plunder itself. Because resources are necessarily overused by the compulsion to accumulate, there arises a drive to fully protect them elsewhere. The wilderness fetish mystifies large-scale nature conservation by positioning it in opposition to capitalist exploitation. It satisfies the desire for change without posing a real threat to the status quo. Such ‘solutions’ remain within the realm of the conventional and fetishised, and thus contribute to, or even explain, “the sustained appeal of the protectionist ideas” (Büscher, 2024: 3).

So, what is to be done? To be clear, we are not opposed to nature conservation per se. However, following Ellis et al. (2021), we hold that meeting global nature conservation goals requires reviving and embracing “deep cultural and societal connections with the biodiversity” (2021: 7) we seek to preserve. It should not be “disentangled” from human consciousness, as Vettesse and Pendegrass (2022, 54) suggest. We are sympathetic to the convivial conservation approach (Büscher and Fletcher 2020, 2023) for its reflexive criticism of conservation. Convivial conservation is to nature conservation as the Fairtrade movement is to commodity production: it cannot fully counteract the fetish, but can mitigate some of its effects (Hudson and Hudson, 2003). Mitigating conservation provides spaces where natural processes can temporarily unfold beyond direct commodification. However, in the age of capital, such conservation spaces tend to function as ‘nature fixes’ with stabilising rather than transformative character (Fraser, 2023).

Convivial conservation's potential to develop transformative social resources depends on whether its conservation spaces become embedded in collective social practices, forms of cooperation, care, and communing that might challenge the fetishised separations between humans, and between humans and nature. However, “the normative bias in favour of ‘good conviviality’” (Costa, 2019: 14) tends to obscure the fact that conviviality and inequality can and do go together. Therefore, we suggest infusing it with the notion of radical sharing (Ivanova and Büchs, 2023), as “an important levelling mechanism to make societies more egalitarian” (Widlok, 2021: 8). In this sense, a solution to the capitalist ecological malaise can only be found in sharing the planet on socialist or ‘commonist’ grounds. We might even conceive such approaches as a whole-earth socialism.