Hazel Henderson

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Hazel Henderson (born 1933 in Bristol, England) is a futurist and an evolutionary economist. She is the author of several books including Building A Win-Win World, Beyond Globalization, Planetary Citizenship (with Daisaku Ikeda), and Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy (with Simran Sethi).

Henderson is now a television producer for the public television series Ethical Markets. She has been Regent's Lecturer at the University of California (Santa Barbara) and held the Horace Albright Chair in Conservation at the University of California (Berkeley). She has also been a traveling lecturer and panelist. Recently, she has served on the boards of such publications as Futures Research Quarterly, The State of the Future Report, and E/The Environmental Magazine (USA), Resurgence, Foresight and Futures (UK). She advised the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment and the National Science Foundation from 1974 to 1980.

Henderson has been in good part concerned with finding the unexplored areas in standard economics and the "blind spots" of conventional economists. Most of her work relates to the creation of an interdisciplinary economic and political theory with a focus on environmental and social concerns. For instance, she has delved into the area of the "value" of such unquantifiables as clean air and clean water, needed in tremendous abundance by humans and other living organisms. This work led to the development, with Calvert Group, of the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators.

[edit] What defines the "realities" that scientists study?

Henderson has been one of the critics to point out that the definitions of "realities" devised by natural and social scientists often pertain to the "realities" they are paid to study — begging the questions as to who has funded these investigators and theoreticians, and why? Who deems certain research grants to be worthy of funding? Which questions crop up in the first place?

Henderson believes that the various threats to peace, community security, and good environment have led us into a new era in which we are obliged to look for values, information, and know-how that we seemed to be able to do without until recent decades.

[edit] Books

Simran Sethi coauthor, Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2006, ISBN 978-1933392233
Daisaku Ikeda coauthor, Planetary Citizenship, Middleway Press, 2004, ISBN 978-0972326728, 256 pgs
Hazel Henderson et al, Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators, Calvert Group, 2000, ISBN 978-0967689104, 392 pgs
Beyond Globalization. Kumarian Press, 1999, ISBN 978-1565491076, 88 pgs
Building a Win-Win World. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 1997, ISBN 978-1576750278, 320 pgs
Creating Alternative Futures. Kumarian Press, 1996, ISBN 978-1565490604, 430 pgs
Hazel Henderson et al, The United Nations: Policy and Financing Alternatives. Global Commission to Fund the United Nations, 1995, ISBN 978-0965058902, 269 pgs
Paradigms in Progress. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 1995, ISBN 978-1881052746, 293 pgs
Redefining Wealth and Progress: New Ways to Measure Economic, Social, and Environmental Change : The Caracas Report on Alternative Development Indicators. Knowledge Systems Inc., 1990, ISBN 978-0942850246, 99 pgs
The Politics of the Solar Age. Knowledge Systems Inc., 1988, ISBN 978-0941705066, 433 pgs
And She Who Gives, George R. Reeve Ltd, 1985, ISBN 978-0900616204, 160 pgs