Imagine you are a young mother of a beautiful infant girl and you just moved to a bustling city. The air is so polluted your baby is covered in soot. You are constantly cleaning soot off your child. You alert city hall but nothing changes. What would you do? If you were Hazel Henderson in 1964, you formed Citizens For Clean Air and petitioned for local, state, and federal pollution legislation. Your hard work changed weather reporting — since 1964, it included an air pollution index!
Ms. Henderson was a self-taught environmentalist and futurist who became a lecturer, panelist, and advisor to corporations and government agencies. She gathered and shared news from around the world about corporations that care, technology that is kind to the environment, socially responsible investing, and sustainable development. Hazel Henderson authored hundreds of articles and nine books on corporate responsibility, sustainability, and the green economy. In The Politics of the Solar Age, written more than forty years ago, she predicted the need to phase out fossil fuels.
She popularized the saying “Think globally, act locally.” She cared deeply for the environment and had a good grasp of finance, advocating overhauling the economic model to include pollution, resource depletion, and social costs. These were excluded in balance sheets and GDP/GNP, and not seen as corporate responsibility. It’s as if contamination, depleted resources, and ravaged land have no fiscal impact! She advocated for holding polluters accountable not just to stockholders but to everyone including the public who are affected by what a business does and how it does it.
