Governments use the money-based accounting systems of their national economies to calculate macroeconomic indicators, such as Gross Domestic Product, Gross National Product, and Per Capita Income. Over the last few years, in response to the perceived lack of comprehensiveness for such accounting systems, more attention has been placed on the economic use and evaluation of ecosystems. Methods for calculating the value of ecological services are attracting interest as an instrument to convert the non-monetary values of the environment into real monetary thinking. The scientific discussion on methods to estimate these values is still embryonic. In several cases, the values of environmental services seem to be used arbitrarily for economic-based instruments, such as charging entrance payments to visitors, and establishing a value for ecosystem services and natural capital. This study summarizes the theoretical basis of environmental accounting based on ecological thermodynamics and reinterprets socio-economic systems from the perspective of donors. Emergy, the total amount of solar equivalent energy that is invested by the environment in support of a given process, is suggested as a scientific measure of the direct and indirect work performed by the biosphere. Within such a "donor-side" perspective, the value of a resource relies on the effort that is needed for its production and delivery over a "trial and error" process that ensures optimization of resource use. Finally, based on the improvements in the recent emergy methods, four development perspectives are given:1) the continuous updating of the emergy benchmarks reinforces the foundation of the non-value accounting of ecosystem service functions; 2) there have been large numbers of emergy analyses of ecological assets and ecology; 3) the difference between the monetary and non-monetary values of ecological service functions lies in the transfer of environmental ethics from anthropocentric to ecocentric perspectives; and 4) the ecological perspective suggests that it is necessary to study the relationship between eco-service function and ecological value. From the thermodynamic perspective, the study of ecological service functions establishes the possibility of proposing environmental taxes. This study suggests both monetary and non-monetary accounting approaches could be used to quantitatively account for natural capital without relying solely on financial tools based on human preferences and fluctuating market dynamics.