‘Accounting in the Anthropocene’: A practitioner view

When I read Bebbington and Rubin (2022), it very refreshingly said we are at the start of a journey and that you do not pretend to have the answers. You say the paper provides a framing with multiple questions. This feels like a bit of an understatement because the shift in world views that is embedded here is quite mind-boggling. A core idea in the paper is that the Anthropocene is like no other period in the history of our planet. This is because we are the architects of what is happening, and we know it. First, we can conceptualise and understand our world as an interconnected web of impacts and dependencies. Secondly, we are conscious of what we are doing to the planet and if we don’t act now, we will become extinct and take a lot of life on Earth with us. The other thing that struck me was just how tiny this period of time called the Anthropocene is, when compared with how high the stakes are. The narrative of the Anthropocene is often distinctly negative, with overtones of ‘We’re all doomed’ and one thing I took from your lecture was a real positive: we have an opportunity and we have the capacity to get it right. My initial reaction to the paper and to the P.D. Leake lecture on which it is based was that the optimist in me says I believe we will get there, while the pessimist says that we are in for an incredibly bumpy ride and we probably will not act until things get worse – or maybe a lot worse. Many questions came to mind, but I have distilled them into three themes. One is that conceptualising the world in systems turns upside-down our neat, categorised, mechanistic sense of the world that separates things into distinct and unconnected buckets. It shifts our understanding from being complicated to complex. Second, it turns our sense of corporate governance inside out. Third, it makes accounting incredibly difficult because it is no longer about accounting for the entity, but about making sense of how that entity relates to the world and to society. That has huge implications for the accountant. To take the first point: has our understanding of the world just been turned upside-down? I said complicated and complex. If something is complicated, you can take it apart, repair the