For generations, society has considered nature priceless. In reality, it’s been treated as worthless.
When something is priceless, it sits outside the market. It can’t be bought or sold; sacred, perhaps, but ultimately untouched by the mechanisms that actually move capital and shape behaviour.
The result? Centuries of destruction without consequence. No price, no incentive to protect. No market signal, no reason to restore.
Now, as humanity faces environmental and social oblivion alongside rapid advances in technology, artificial intelligence, and data-driven markets, the need to use price to value and protect our indispensable natural assets has never been more paramount.
For Dr Rich Stockdale, a transformative environmentalist and CEO of Oxygen Conservation, one of the biggest, most costly mistakes has been treating nature as “priceless”. He argues that the future economy will belong to those who learn to restore, scale, and compound natural capital – and why the greatest opportunities of this century will be built from the living world. This is at the heart of his galvanising new book, Rewilding Wealth: From Extractive Capitalism to Regenerative Returns (Rethink Press), building on the success of his first best-selling title, Scaling Conservation.
Making waves across the conservation and finance industries, Stockdale co-founded Oxygen Conservation in 2021 with Oxygen House Group, with a simple hypothesis: show that nature is a bankable proposition, and that this can unlock huge capital flows to Scale Conservation and restore entire landscapes. With a growing 50,000-acre natural capital portfolio, currently valued at hundreds of millions of pounds, Oxygen Conservation is actively transforming landscapes into thriving ecosystems for both people and wildlife, clearly demonstrating what this future looks like in practice.
Through first-hand experience, relentless commitment, and visionary thinking, Rewilding Wealth outlines this new operating system for nature. Structured across seven accessible chapters, Stockdale invites readers to explore real-world stories and insights drawn from Oxygen Conservation’s journey – shaped through successes, setbacks, and continual adaptation. The book explores topics ranging from why we are entering a renaissance for natural capital innovation and how the UK is redefining quality within the voluntary carbon market, to building a high-performance culture and confronting uncomfortable conservation truths. Throughout this, Stockdale interweaves references, acknowledgments, and tributes to important people, defining moments, and significant places.
Rewilding Wealth isn’t a tidy origin story or a polished case study, but a living, breathing account of what it feels like to build something real in real time. These reflections reinforce fundamental principles and encourage readers to think critically about the future of conservation, capitalism, and investment.
Synthesising research with field-tested perspective, Rewilding Wealth is part thesis, part playbook, and part provocation for investors, founders, and environmentalists driving the first generation of nature-positive capitalism. What readers gain from this book – and the questions, challenges, and ideas it sparks – will profoundly shape the future of the natural capital economy.
Rewilding Wealth is available to buy on Amazon and in all good bookshops from 2nd June 2026.
