Environmental Accounting—EMERGY and Environmental Decision Making

for example clothes, books, food, minerals, fuels, information, art, technology, species, electricity, biodiversity, and so on).Everything which we regard as being of real value has to be produced and maintained by work processes in or of the environment.Sometimes this work is aided by people and sometimes not.Market value is what people are willing to pay for work or the products of work, and is the principal method of accounting used in economics.However, money and market values cannot be used to evaluate the real wealth from the environment.The problems are twofold.First, money is paid only to people for their contributions, and never to the environment.Second, market values are inverse to real-wealth contributions.When the resources from the environment are abundant, little work is required from the economy, costs are small and prices low.However, this is when the net contribution of real wealth to the economy is greatest•veryone has abundant resources and a high standard of living.Understanding the economy requires that environmental production and economic use are measured together.This measure of everything has to be a function of measurable property that is in everything.Howard T. Odum argues that this measure is energy, not money.Over the years Odum has developed a science-based evaluation system in which both economic values and environmental values are represented by energy.Hence, it is possible to measure the donor value (the physical production cost) of an item in a system by counting the available energy of one kind that had to be spent to make it.Odum labels this energy measure EMERGY, sometimes referred to as "energy memory."Its unit is the emjoule.In his latest book Environmental Accounting : EMERGY and Environmental Decision Making, Odum describes the theoretical basis, calculation procedures, and applications of EMERGY evaluation.EMERGY evaluation does not replace economic evaluation; it complements it.EMERGY evaluation seems to be especially useful in situations where the contribution from the environment is great, as in agriculture, forestry, fisheries, and water management.Odum gives numerous examples of