of the green economy and socially
responsible investing,
she taught her followers to act
locally.
Hazel Henderson, a self-taught
environmentalist and futurist who became an apostle of the green economy and of
socially responsible investing, and who popularized the slogan “think globally,
act locally,” died — or “went virtual,” as she would have put it — on Sunday at
her home in St. Augustine, Fla. She was 89.
The cause was complications of skin cancer, said Linda C. Crompton, chief
executive of Ethical Markets, the media company that Ms. Henderson founded in
2004 to promote, in her words, capitalism’s evolution “beyond maximizing profits
for shareholders and management, to benefiting all stakeholders.”
Ridiculing conventional economists — and relishing her reputation in some
quarters as a crank — she sought to redefine gross national product as a measure
of prosperity not merely to encompass material success on the bases of the cash
value of goods and services produced annually, but also to include health,
social, educational and other benchmarks that, as Senator Robert F. Kennedy
declared in 1968 after being briefed by Ms. Henderson, “make life worthwhile.”
“She was instrumental in pressing for qualitative measurements suitable for
people focused on a democratic economy, in contrast to the dominant monetized
yardsticks of the corporate economy,” the consumer activist Ralph Nader said in
a phone interview, “and through networking she spread those measures throughout
the international civic community.”
The environmentalist and author Bill McKibben described Ms. Henderson on Twitter
as “a visionary ecological economist.”
Ms. Henderson called herself an “independent, self-employed futurist” who, like
the nation’s founders, raised warning flags about the factionalism engendered by
party politics. She wrote nine books, perhaps most notably “The Politics of the
Solar Age” (1981), which heralded the environmental movement’s embrace of
sustainable energy sources as a substitute for fossil fuels like coal and oil.
In The New York Times Book Review, the political scientist Langdon Winner,
reviewing “The Politics of the Solar Age,” called Ms. Henderson “a capable
successor” to E.F. Schumacher, the author of “Small Is Beautiful: A Study of
Economics as if People Mattered” (1973).
Mr. Winner said that Ms. Henderson wrote “in a lively, well-informed,
deliberately outrageous style about matters important to us all,” and added,
“Those weary of threadbare liberal economics and repelled by present-day
conservative nostrums will find here a great deal to ponder.”
Ms. Henderson also wrote “Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy” (2007),
later the basis of a PBS television series.
Deliberately or not, her style outraged members of the academy, who bristled at
her conclusion that “economics is a form of brain damage” and at a professional
agenda she said was aimed at “defrocking the economics priesthood.”
“One might even say that the beneficent ‘invisible hand’ envisioned by Adam
Smith has become for increasing numbers of Americans a clumsy, heedless
‘invisible foot,’ which tramples on social, human and environmental values,” she
wrote.
Ms. Henderson’s own professional evolution was a modern Cinderella story: A
British-born high school graduate with no interest in going to college, she
immigrated to America, where she was baptized in the environmental movement by
the ash spouting from New York’s garbage-burning incinerators.
Forced to bathe her baby daughter every day just to remove a patina of soot, and
rebuffed by indifferent officials when she complained about pollution to City
Hall, Ms. Henderson and another concerned Manhattan parent, Carolyn Konheim,
formed Citizens for Clean Air, a groundbreaking environmental group. Among other
innovations, their organization transformed an obscure measurement, the air
pollution index, into a fixture of daily weather reports.
Jean Hazel Mustard was born on March 27, 1933, in Bristol, Somerset, England.
Her father, Kenneth, was a businessman. She recalled her mother, Dorothy May
(Jesseman) Mustard, as a proto-environmentalist who grew fruits and vegetables
and raised chickens. (Hazel later became a vegetarian and preferred recycled
products, including toilet paper — in keeping with her promulgation of the
Scottish planner Patrick Geddes’s early 20th-century axiom to “think globally,
act locally.”)
“I learned from my experience growing up in a typical patriarchal family in
Bristol, a port of the slave trade in Britain, that women were trained to be the
givers and men were trained to be the dominant takers,” she wrote last year on
the website of Radix, which calls itself “a think tank for the radical center.”
“My mother was kept penniless by my father, a powerful business executive, and
he forced her to grovel for money to pay our grocery bills.”
She graduated from the Clifton School, a girls’ high school, in 1950; worked as
a telephone operator, saleswoman and hotel clerk; and married Carter Henderson,
who wrote for The Wall Street Journal, in 1957, the same year she moved to New
York. She became a naturalized citizen in 1962 and moved to Florida in the
mid-1970s.
Her survivors include a daughter, Alexandra Leslie Camille Henderson, from that
marriage, which ended in divorce in 1981, and a grandson.
In 1996, she shared the Boston Research Center’s Global Citizen Award with A.
Pérez Esquivel of Argentina, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1980. That
same year she married Alan F. Kay, an internet pioneer who had founded a Wall
Street computerized trading concern, and who underwrote her founding of Ethical
Markets. Together they also started the Global Commission to Fund the United
Nations. Mr. Kay died in 2016.
She wrote for The Harvard Business Review in the 1960s and ‘70s; was named
“citizen of the year” by the New York County Medical Society in 1967; was a
regents’ lecturer at the University of California, Santa Barbara; held a chair
in conservation at the University of California, Berkeley; and advised the U.S.
Office of Technology Assessment, the National Academy of Engineering and the
National Science Foundation.
She remained self-employed, she told The Tampa Bay Tribune in 2005, because “I
would have been fired off any job for insubordination.”
Like that of many futurists, her success was based on savvy intuition. It was
also based in part on the fact that either so much time had elapsed that most
people had forgotten what she once predicted, or it hadn’t happened yet.
In 1982, for example, she was asked by The Times to forecast what the millennium
would look like.
“You will definitely see this returning to a more human scale society,” Ms,
Henderson said. “It will be more efficient and do things locally. It won’t make
sense to buy Wonder Bread baked in Illinois. In the future, we will share
capital goods like lawn mowers and freezers and houses.”
Was she wrong about any of her predictions? “Only about timing,” Mr. Nader said.
“She thought quicker than other people did, because she was an optimist.”
Sam Roberts, an obituaries reporter, was previously The Times’s urban affairs
correspondent and is the host of “The New York Times Close Up,” a weekly news
and interview program on CUNY-TV. @samrob12
