Over the last fifty years, the Asian Arowana (Scleropages formosus) has transformed from a low value food fish to a mass-produced endangered species currently traded as the most expensive aquarium fish in the world (with regular retail prices of $50,000 USD). As a result, Indonesia has become the main economic location for breeding and rearing the most expensive Arowana variant – the so-called “Super Red Arowana”, which is also native to Indonesia. This dissertation project examines the complex relationships between monetary value determinations and the environment, using the commercialization of the Super Red Arowana as an example. This topic is central to the discourse on human-environment relations as global environmental change places increasing pressure on both the environment itself and the economic, social, and political systems on which people live. As a result, human and nonhuman actors within these systems are forced to adapt. Consequently, the commercialization of Super Red Arowana can be understood as an economic adaptation process. Through the application of ethnographic methods, value creation practices are analyzed to decipher how commercialization operates in emerging markets. Particular attention is paid to the multitude of feedback effects between the fish itself, the environment, and the people that are triggered or altered by commodification. The dissertation shows how the dramatic monetary valuation of the fish is intertwined in multiple ways with our scientific understanding of the species, the socioeconomic conditions in Indonesia, and the lives of the people involved in the trade, and why an endangered species could be successfully commodified in the luxury sector of the ornamental fish trade. In this way, arbitrary, contingent, and relational factors are elaborated that make economic adaptations to environmental change possible.