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From time to time, it proves useful to theorists of advancing disciplines to consider how ideas developing in related disciplines might provide insights into their own progression. Environmental accounting and the systems sciences are parallel developments of the past half-century. The purpose of this article is to introduce certain ideas that are maturing in the systems sciences for consideration by environmental accountants and managers. Particular emphasis is placed on the works of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and James Grier Miller. Collectively, these ideas present evidence that economies emerge in environmental processes and continue only as long as they are fed by those processes. Accounting is concerned with economic process disclosure. A conclusion might be drawn, consequently, that environmental processes should be conspicuously disclosed in public accounting statements.

At present, education often takes place in an organized setting. From the end of the 18th century onwards, the educational system has unmistakably become differentiated — into the nonorganized family and the organized school or university. This evolution is connected with the growing complexity of modern society and with evolutions in other social subsystems, such as politics and the economy. The family context normally creates numerous moments of casual education, but it can hardly provide adequate support for lengthy and complex processes of learning. Formal organizations are able to specify and preserve the criteria necessary to steer these complex processes in the right direction. Accordingly, the introduction of compulsory schooling — in Western Europe during the long 19th century, reaching from Prussia (1764) to Belgium (1914) — has strengthened the role of organized education. How has this fact, viz. that education now takes place in an organized setting, influenced the nature of educational interaction?

From the perspective of information ethics, one of the purposes of human life is flourishing. This means people ought to be free to engage in creative and flexible actions that allow the fullest realization of their potential as intelligent, decision-making agents – i.e., those actions that a person experiences as meaningful. Researchers have suggested that many people in the post-industrial West experience a lack of meaning in their lives, and this “crisis of meaning” is implicated in many of society's ills; consequently many people are not flourishing as they might. Flourishing relies on information access, processing, and understanding, as well as a particular meaningful experiential dimension of information activities. To speak of information experience, personally meaningful activities are experienced as self-constructive ones, characterized by focused curiosity and presence, and which have a central practice that is supported by peripheral practices. Examples of personally meaningful information behavior from the serious leisure hobby of ultramarathon running are discussed as illustration. In reaching for a more ethical information society, we should seek to infuse more of our information activities with deeper personal meaning.