The environmental crisis and the technique

Opportunity for a change in the relationship between accounting and nature

Abstract

The current environmental crisis is a structural consequence of capitalism. The expanding economic subsystem overflows the boundary capacities of the natural physical system as support and landfill. The background of such an event is the contradiction in the relationship between man and nature. An extractive relationship, of exhaustion and extinction of resources, where the nature transformed into financial capital, result of the relations of subordination and domination of nature. The prevailing paradigm in the relationship is economic-financial, dominated by technique, both are signs of the modern era and determine the orientation of domains of particular knowledge. Environmental accounting whose development can be summarized in five research approaches, in its fundamental essence, does not escape the prevailing paradigm and the deployment of the technique. Their efforts to contribute to solving the environmental crisis fail if the power structures and institutions that determine it do not change before. For this reason, it is urgent to respond to the pretensions of capital to prolong the agony, reformulated the prevailing relations of accounting with the environment. These can be glimpsed from the contributions of feminism and the decolonial political project, which proposes economic relations with nature in terms of meanings of subsistence and sustainability.