Hazel Henderson

Bio

Extensive narrative bio

" An intellectual boutique for redesigning cultural DNA… a global acupuncturist applying fine policy needles at optimal intervention points with the goal of reconfiguring dysfunctional systems. Those are apt descriptions of Hazel Henderson, a brilliant, self-taught, systems thinker, “anti-economist,” and determined outsider who has been knocking hard for years with a remarkable degree of success on the doors of the establishment to deliver her iconoclastic "beyond macroeconomic" message. The sustainability movement is only now beginning to catch up with this visionary thinker.

Rewriting economic scorecards has been perhaps Henderson’s most enduring passion. “It has just always been so obvious to me that if you change the scorecard you change the game,” says Henderson. “And I have always been very interested in changing the unsustainable economic game.” Her core belief is that GDP is “a malfunctioning strand of cultural DNA replicating unsustainability” that needs to be redesigned.

Henderson traces her obsession with exposing the flaws in this key indicator to a defining childhood memory. Her parents had just returned to their home in the English countryside from a trip to London and described to her a black “fog” so dense that they could hardly see across their hotel room. This was the historic “Great Smog” of December 1954, induced by the discharges of coal-fired furnaces, and which was to be responsible for 4000 premature deaths in one week in the city.

That memory came back to Henderson with full force when she immigrated to New York in the early 1960s andwitnessed first-hand the horrific impact on air quality of the city’s millions of garbage incinerators. A born activist, Henderson lost no time as a new American citizen in co-founding Citizens for Clean Air in 1964, three years before the first federal anti-pollution enforcement legislation was enacted. When then Mayor Robert Wagner failed to take the organization seriously, she convinced Senator Robert F. Kennedy to join her Clean Air colleagues on a helicopter ride over Manhattan in 1967 to view the sources of pollution. Henderson expounded on what was in her view so fundamentally wrong with GDP as a measure of prosperity--how absurd it was to add to it, rather than subtract from it, negative economic activities like cleaning up air pollution. The New York Medical Society agreed and gave Henderson its Citizen of the Year Award in 1967." (http://capitalinstitute.org/forum/braintrust/profile-hazel-henderson)

Kudo's

John Fullerton, Founder, Capital Institute:

"Hazel never ceases to amaze me. Susan Witt, Executive Director of the E. F. Schumacher Society, once described Hazel as a "national treasure." It's true. Never formally trained in economics, Hazel's grasp of the subject, particularly its shortcomings, is remarkable. Hazel is a systems thinker, with a unique grasp of the multiple disciplines necessary to be able to see, holistically, the systemic challenges we face. Yet it's Hazel's intellect, energy, passion, generosity, and drive, often against the grain where it can be lonely, year after year, "self inflicted" I might add, that is so special. I owe a great personal debt to my teacher, advisory board member, and inspirational friend, Hazel Henderson." (http://capitalinstitute.org/forum/braintrust/profile-hazel-henderson)