Selling scarcity: reflexive green accumulation in the acoustic guitar industry

This paper conceptualizes profit opportunities in markets for high-value products where resource scarcity is acute, trade in biotic material increasingly regulated, and consumer environmental concern magnified: what we call reflexive green accumulation. We do so from the example of acoustic guitar manufacturing, a timber-dependent industry both grappling with scarcity and regulation, and willing to acknowledge the gravity of forest over-exploitation. In the guitar industry marketing analysed, forests are described as commons; forestry projects and procurement experts are profiled; and individual trees celebrated. Following extant scarcity crises and consequential enforcement of environmental regulation, critiques of capitalist nature destruction are enfolded into the making and marketing of new products, generating symbolic and moral value. Rather than mere greenwashing, reflexive green accumulation describes responses to regulation and consumer expectations that embrace and rework scarcities. Certain forms of sustainability capitalism thus derive value from a dialectical relationship between humans endangering species and seeking to protect them.