Please join Red Emma's in welcoming Alyssa Battistoni, author of Free Gifts. To understand contemporary ecological problems from biodiversity collapse to climate change, Battistoni contends, we have to understand how some things come to have value under capitalism鈥攁nd how others do not. To help us do so, she recovers and reinterprets the idea of the free gift of nature used by classical economic thinkers to describe what we gratuitously obtain from the natural world, and builds on Karl Marx鈥檚 critique of political economy to show how capitalism fundamentally treats nature as free for the taking. This novel theory of capitalism鈥檚 relationship to nature not only helps us understand contemporary ecological breakdown, but also casts capitalism鈥檚 own core dynamics in a new light.