Hazel Henderson
Environmentalist who fought air pollution and urged economists to take account of quality of life
HAZEL HENDERSON, who has died aged 89, was a British-born American environmentalist who trained her guns at the “dismal science” of economics. She became an activist in the early 1960s while living in New York when she was concerned about the effect on her two-yearold daughter of pollution in the city emitted by waste incinerators.
She started a letter-writing campaign, founded a group called Citizens For Clean Air and persuaded the major television and radio stations to create the first Air Pollution Index for weather broadcasts.
But she incurred the hostility of business interests and found herself accused of communist sympathies and of wanting to sabotage businesses and jobs with her calls for tighter regulation. “I had to teach myself economics, because every time I wanted to organise something there was always some economist telling me it would be uneconomic,” she recalled.
She was shocked to discover that the conventional yardsticks of human progress – GNP/GDP, employment rates, the Dow Jones Index – took no account of such “goods” as human health, clean air and water, safe food and so on.
According to conventional economic wisdom the “costs” of pollution and resource depletion could be “externalised” from corporate and national accounts – effectively becoming no one’s responsibility.
Indeed they only “counted” during legal or regulatory action following disasters – and then they featured on the plus side of the equation because of the value of the emergency, medical and legal services involved in dealing with them.
Economics, Hazel Henderson concluded, was not a science, but “politics in disguise”, while cash-flow-based GDP was “a malfunctioning strand of cultural DNA replicating unsustainability”.
In 1967 she persuaded a young Senator Robert Kennedy to join her on a helicopter ride over Manhattan to see the problem for himself, and in a speech the following year Kennedy observed that “GNP measures everything… except that which makes life worthwhile.”
The first federal anti-pollution enforcement legislation was enacted the same year, but convincing the economics profession of the need to overhaul their textbooks was an uphill task.
As well as writing dozens of articles and a series of books calling for economic indicators to take account of all costs and benefits, not just those that have a cash value, in the 1970s she contrived to be appointed as a member of the advisory council on a newly created Congressional Office of Technology Assessment.
This, she recalled, was “where I honed my consciousness of how the economics profession had colonised the public policy process. They got everyone to believe in this idea that everything had to have an economic impact statement, that you couldn’t do anything until an economist signed off on it. I was amazed.”
But she was delighted when the Public Relations Society of America described her as “the most dangerous woman” in the country.
Gradually, however, her ideas became mainstream and in 1992 at the United Nations “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro, 178 governments, including the US government, agreed to factor in social and environmental costs in their national accounts.
In 2000 her work on ascribing “value” to unquantifiable environmental and social goods led to the publication, with the Calvert Group, of the Calvert-henderson Quality of Life Indicators.
She was born Hazel Mustard in Bristol on March 27 1933 to Kenneth Mustard, a businessman, and Dorothy, née Jesseman. After leaving Clifton High School for Girls she worked as a switchboard operator, saleswoman and hotel clerk.
She traced her concern with pollution to her memory of her parents describing a visit to London one December, when they encountered a black “fog” so dense that they could hardly see across their hotel room. This was the “Great Smog” of 1952 which caused 4,000 premature deaths in one week.
In 1957 she married Carter Henderson, a former London correspondent for The Wall Street Journal who went on to become an IBM executive. They moved to New York, where she became a US citizen in 1962.
At various times Hazel Henderson taught at the University of California-santa Barbara, held the Horace Albright Chair in Conservation at the University of California (Berkeley), lectured around the world and advised American and international governmental, technological and conservation bodies.
As well as numerous honorary doctorates, she was an honorary member of the Club of Rome and a co-winner of the 1996 Global Citizen Award. She was a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
From the early 1980s she made it a point of principle to invest in renewable energy companies, and in 2004 she founded Ethical Markets Media to disseminate information on green investing, green energy, corporate citizenship and sustainable development. From 2007 she produced a television series, Ethical Markets, a “financial lifestyle” programme broadcast on PBS.
Her first book, Creating Alternative Futures, was published in 1978 with a foreword by the economist EF Schumacher, author of Small is Beautiful. It sold some 40,000 copies. In The Politics of the Solar Age (1981) she argued that to shift into renewables, the world had to revolutionise classical economic models and confront the fossil fuel industry. Her other books included Paradigms in Progress (1991);
Building a Win-win World (1996); Beyond Globalization (1999) and Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy (2007), which won the Axiom Best Business Book Bronze Award. Her marriage to Carter Henderson was dissolved in 1981 and in 1996 she married Alan Kay, who died in 2016. She is survived by her daughter from her first marriage.
Hazel Henderson, born March 27 1933, died May 22 2022