Informed by a Marxist theoretical perspective, the aim of this essay is to critically reflect on the relationship between capital and nature and specifically the 'Rio process', which started in 1992 and continued with the recent Rio+20 conference. In this process we have seen a discursive evolution from sustainable development to green economy. We argue that these two terms nevertheless relate to fundamentally similar and continuous practices, enabling capital to co-opt once radical concepts, such as sustainability, in order to include them in its logic of accumulation. In this essay we discuss a range of authors to critically reflect about capital's recent reorganization attempts and its continuous onslaught on nature, which aims at preserving its continuous growth, counteracting the crisis in which it is immersed.
Sustainable development; Green economy; Financialization; Capitalist accumulation
