ABSTRACT
In June 1969 the faculty of the Yale School of Forestry was invited, for the first time, to participate in the Annual Yale Alumni Seminar. The four lectures given by the forestry faculty are published under the title Man and his Environment: The Ecological Limits to Optimism (Mergen, 1970). The lectures dealt with various aspects of the environmental crisis of the day that was most vividly described in the Club of Rome’s report (Meadows, et al., 1969). One essay dealt with the pressures of human population growth on a planet of finite resources, and another dealt with the dilemma of reconciling freedom with the responsibility humans have to care for the planet. A third essay discussed the level of existence that might be possible if the population explosion was curtailed and we could learn to live within our means. The fourth essay, and the one from which the title of the collection came, was about values and whether or not the values we humans hold, characterized by boundless optimism in human possibilities, is possible given the environmental difficulties we faced in the 1970s. The optimism inherent in Western capitalism, indicated by popular oxymora like sustainable development and Schumpeter’s (1942) cliché “creative destruction,” represent rhetorical moves to assure ourselves that tweaking the system is all that is required. Like the parable of the fishes and loaves wherein the multitudes were fed with limited resources, we are reluctant to believe that such miracles might not be forthcoming from the technology in which we have all placed our faith. That we might not be able to have our cake and eat it too, is a prospect that our deeply embedded economic and political values prevent us from giving any serious consideration. The accounting discipline is one totally infused with the optimism bred by faith in technology and the workings of a capitalist system of free markets and unlimited human material aspiration. The development of the accounting discipline since the founding of the accounting profession in the nineteenth century has been shaped to serve this institutionalized optimism.
