An industry in crisis: accounting and accountability in Scottish salmon farming

Georgakopoulos and Thomson examine on one recent attempt to engage and report on ecological impact. It concerned the Scottish salmon farming industry. Initially motivated by an expectation that the use of environmental accounting would be present in evaluating the decision to 'go organic', they detail the salmon farmers' decisions on organic farming, drawing on Beck, 1992 U. Beck, Risk society: Towards a new modernity, Sage Publications, London (1992).Beck, 1992, Beck, 1995 and Beck, 1996 risk society thesis. They found, disappointingly, that the decision to go organic had little to do with an appreciation of the structural social, environmental and economic risks associated with the industry. Rather, price forecasts and agricultural decision heuristics were found to be more likely explanations. From the perspective of social and environmental research, a key issue in the case was the absence of environmental accounting in guiding the decision.