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Journal of Environmental Accounting and Management 12(2) (2024) 169--184 | DOI:10.5890/JEAM.2024.06.005

Thomas Abel

Department of Human Development and Psychology, Tzu Chi University, Hualien, Taiwan

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Abstract

The evaluation of cultural information is a great challenge for any form of environmental accounting, including the emergy methodology advocated in this paper. What has been needed for some time are better tools to understand and represent culture in quantitative analyses. This paper accomplishes that objective with several innovations. Its focus is one 'scale' in the multiple scales of cultural production and maintenance, as developed in my earlier papers conceiving of culture as a nested hierarchy of information cycles. It is an 'area' analysis, which evaluates the total emergy contributions from the total area of information production, in this case the island of Taiwan. And it is a 'parallel cycles' evaluation that accounts for both the information objects (academic paper, books), but also the information required to manage the systems of information production, specifically the research centers and publication houses. The analysis produces several transformities for information, influenced by the multiple methods proposed by Odum for evaluating information. It concludes that a modified 'recipient interaction time' method is the most versatile methodology.

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