Six Capitals deftly utilises accounting to remind us of our wider social and environmental responsibilities. Gleeson-White is concerned about "the invisibility of the earth's living systems in the global economy and accounting measures". She has devised means of redress, ones cogently formulated and pungently argued.
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First published in 2014 and now revised and updated, this book follows on from Gleeson-White's earlier Double Entry. Both volumes seek not merely to explain accounting but to stretch and modernise that discipline. She has in mind adding a moral and social dimension to accounting, which then might double as a form of reckoning, or even a confessional.
Gleeson-White's preface boldly sets the bar: "Can accountants save the planet?" Equally bluntly, her third chapter announces one of her targets: "Dealing with the corporation as monster and psychopath".
Gleeson-White outlines and recommends four changes to our ways of accounting for - listing, calculating and reckoning for - damage our corporations and economies are doing.
Corporations would not be responsible nor accountable simply to their shareholders. Nor would business be able to diminish the value of those socio-economic factors economists awkwardly label as "externalities".
She wants to bind corporations legally to benefit society and the economy, while also turning a profit. She commends natural capital and eco-system accounting as well as rights of nature movements. She also advocates the introduction of multi-capital reporting to account for the wealth of society and nature as well as profit.
Those four movements, all of which now enjoy distinct histories and constituencies, naturally overlap. When the first edition of this book was published, Gleeson-White chartered the emergence of the movements from "unconnected murmurs on the horizon".
Now, together they make up a rather more rigorous and coherent approach to profit and loss than well-being indices or gauges of which might seem to be the happiest nation on earth. Who, anyway, really wants to live in spots like Bhutan or Denmark?
Where the heroes of Gleeson-White's earlier history are folk like Luca Pacioli, who developed book-keeping in Renaissance Venice, her current tributes celebrate socio-economic wins at Lake Erie, in a nightingales' forest, even by Prince Charles.
Gleeson-White is a lucid explainer, especially of the state of debate on accounting methods. If she seems too optimistic or enthusiastic about progress, she has nonetheless devised an admirable teaching method for a teachable moment.
