Doxic sunglasses: A response to “Green accounting and Green Eyeshades: Twenty years later”

•This article is a response to Thornton's lead essay in this issue.•Thornton's understanding of accounting is critiqued.•Expanding accounting as recommended by Thornton would paradoxically lead to the intensified commodification of nature.

This article, in responding to Thornton's (this issue) depiction of how accounting might be extended to incorporate environmental issues, offers a critique of mainstream understandings of the accounting function. Specifically, we argue that Thornton's arguments are developed within doxic, or taken-for-granted, parameters regarding what accounting is and what it can be. Expanding the accounting domain whilst staying within these parameters leads to something more than the mere reproduction of the status quo; it leads to intensified commodification of the biosphere.