Back to basics: What do we mean by environmental (and social) accounting and what is it for?—A reaction to Thornton

This paper seeks to explore whether mainstream financial accounting when it appears to genuflect to the ‘environment’ actually has anything substantive do with – or to say about – the natural world. It seems important to remember that conventional financial accounting is a predominantly economic – and not very internally logical – practice which has no substantive conceptual space for environmental or social matters per se. It has no space for what Thielemann calls ‘market alien values’ – values such as environmental concern. The paper re-examines why we might account at all and revisits why accounts which explicitly recognise environmental (and social) issues can be potentially very important indeed. What seems clear is that whilst any account that sought to reflect environmental and social exigencies might choose to use the technologies of accounting – notably debits and credits – there is no essential reason why they must do so. If we wish to account for an environment, we almost certainly would not start with the somewhat bizarre and tortured foundations of conventional financial accounting.