This research project begins from a central problem: as natural and historic environments are increasingly mobilised to provide wellbeing in multiple geographical contexts, barriers to accessing such spaces are widely approached in research circles and public life as naturalised and descriptive identities.

However, recent feminist Marxist scholarship shows that identities such as race, class, gender and ethnicity are related to the structural conditions of capitalism and configured through specific historical encounters (see Bohrer’s (2022) ‘intersectional Marxism’). Therefore, capitalism must be at the centre of how we understand marginalisation as process.

Despite the popularity of blue-scape therapeutic practices – bathing, swimming, soaking in, or consuming therapeutic water – recent legal action, commercialisation, shifting tacit access agreements and land ownership regime changes in Devon, Mongolia and Sikkim mean that such spaces have become difficult to access.

 Addressing the process of resource-making illuminates issues of ownership, access and governance (High 2010). It also helps us to understand how inequalities are made and remade. As Bear and colleagues (2015) show, when something – ‘people, labour, sentiments, plants, animals, life-ways’ – is converted into a resource for various projects of production, inequality emerges.