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| Hazel Henderson | |
Hazel Henderson, an environmental activist and futurist author, died May 22. She was 89. "She built a long career as a gadfly thinker, known for arguing that economic growth had to be balanced with environmental protections and for championing the maxim 'think globally, act locally,' " the Washington Post wrote.
As a young mother in New York City in the 1960s, she fought to make the battle against air pollution a priority in government and the media, helping organize Citizens for Clean Air. Despite a lot of resistance, she achieved some restrictions. "We got what we wanted," she told the Australian Financial Review, "but not before the New York business community branded us as communists. That was my first lesson in how hard entrenched powers resist change."
She then campaigned for social change, publishing a syndicated newspaper column, writing for publications including the Nation and Harvard Business Review, and lecturing around the world. She also wrote nine books, including The Politics of the Solar Age (1981), which aimed to expose "the economics priesthood" that help cause high inflation, unemployment, depleted natural resource and imminent worldwide ecological disaster. In a follow-up book, Building a Win-Win World (1996), she wrote, "My analysis was vilified by economists as wrong-headed and absurd. I learned to interpret this as evidence that I was hitting home."
New York Times reviewer Langdon Winner said that "Henderson writes in a lively, well-informed, deliberately outrageous style about matters important to us all. In her best moments she seems a capable successor to the late E.F. Schumacher. Those weary of threadbare liberal economics and repelled by present-day conservative nostrums will find here a great deal to ponder."