A vocabulary has been metastasising through environmental policy. It did not arrive as a position to be argued with. It crept in quietly, one term at a time, through grant applications, government white papers, and conference panels, until it had colonised the language before most people noticed there was anything to resist. We are told that the central challenge of our warming, degrading world is to make nature investable. We hear about biodiversity credits, green bonds, and nature-based financial instruments. The premise is simple: public funds are scarce, the cost of ecological restoration is vast, and therefore we must design financial structures that allow private institutional capital to flow into conservation.