ABSTRACT
Accounting procedures, calculation, and quantitative measurement of waste, resource depletion, and environmental degradation resulting from human production and consumption have been left wanting. At the international level, the World Commission on Environment and Development found that the data base necessary to account for waste and resource depletion is weak. The central planning of the Communist Party under state socialism, like capitalist market planning, has furthered capital accumulation through a process that has resulted in the accumulation of waste and the depletion of resources. Capitalist liberal democracy has been deficient in environmental accounting practices and public accountability. Accountability demands a political system that has sufficient independence from economic institutions to set ecologically sound rules for the economy. Formal rationality consisted of tunnel-vision rationality and has itself been irrational in broader ecological terms of its failure to develop accounting methods to calculate the ecological impact of its actions.
