All gifts must pass To complete the sacred Circle of Life.
Loss and Gain are
Narrow Terms,
Eclipsed
In GAIA’s cosmic economics. . . .
GAIA does not need
To hoard her riches,
Nor do we.
Cast gladly all our gifts
Upon the water,
Sandy beaches, deserts, too, Necklaces, bracelets,
Pots and arrowheads, Glorious weavings, colors Let them blend
Into the teeming Multitudinous Tapestries of Life
In Universal Giving. – Hazel Henderson, from “Cosmic Economics”
Update: On May 22, 2022, Hazel Henderson “went virtual” (her words), just a couple of weeks after her last interview. Here’s the link to her tribute: https://www.forevermissed.com/hazelhenderson/about
This interview is from 2006, and was published in Volume 6, No. 3 & 4 of Gaian Voices.
Last summer, Hazel Henderson sent me a copy of her latest book, Ethical Markets. I hadn’t heard from her, or anyone in the socially responsible investment community, for many years. As I read her book, with sections on community investing, fair trade, food, health and wellness, and the unpaid “love” economy, as she calls it, I realized that while much has changed since I left behind my work in ecological, community-based economics, much has not. Many of the enterprises I wrote about in my newsletter, CATALYST, and in my books are thriving, as are many of the people I worked with, though most are in different businesses or organizations. So when I decided to focus this issue on Gaian Economics it seemed only natural to talk to Hazel.
Hazel is a futurist, evolutionary economist, author, and television producer. Her books include Beyond Globalization (1999), Building a Win-Win World (1996), Paradigms in Progress (1995), Creating Alternative Futures (1978, 1996), and The Politics of the Solar Age (1981, 1988). They have been translated into numerous languages – French, Italian, German, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese to name a few. Her articles have appeared in more than 250 publications including Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor.
I have always felt a kinship with Hazel because, like me, she doesn’t have a college education yet works in fields where most people boast numerous letters after their names. It certainly didn’t hold her back. In fact, I’m sure it was a factor in her ultimate success which has a great deal to do with her unique view of the world and her belief in the possibility of change. In Chapter One of Creating Alternative Futures she wrote,”I have confessed that I have never attended college, and that not only am I relatively unschooled but also unchurched. Instead, my mother taught me her brand of pantheism which, in retrospect, was a fairly useful basis on which I developed my particular ecological model of reality.”
No way can I do Hazel’s body of work justice in this short introduction. I suggest that you check out her websites: www.ethicalmarkets.com and www.hazelhenderson.com. Here you will find numerous articles, editorials, videos, a wide range of newsletters, investment and otherwise, links to other sites, and information on her television productions. Have fun!
SML: In preparing for this interview I took a look back at the books you’ve written over the years and it’s amazing that, with the exception of a few things that are dated, your books like, Creating Alternative Futures and Politics of the Solar Age are just as relevant today as they were when they came out, perhaps even more so.
HH: That’s pretty funny isn’t it? All my books are still in print, and both the books you just mentioned have been reissued. I have some of the original, first editions of Politics of the Solar Age available, and I still get incredible feedback from that book. At first it didn’t do all that well. It came out just about the time Ronald Reagan came into office, and as you know he went and took all the solar panels off the White House that Jimmy Carter had installed. But things changed and what’s happen- ing today with the energy crisis, well, there it is: The Politics of the Solar Age!
SML: What’s frustrating to me is that so many people just seem to care about is what’s going to happen in the next two or three years when the reality is we’re running out of fossil fuels.
HH: I think the Republicans have been so reprehensible. “Drill, drill, drill” you know? And this $700 billion bailout of Wall Street pushed by Henry Paulson, who was CEO of Goldman Sachs from 1999 until 2006, is absurd. The markets are already realigning with trillions on the sidelines waiting to pick up the bargains! Besides, the Paulson plan was unconstitutional!
SML: I think one of the problems is that people are scared. They only know the way we’ve been living. To me change is where it’s at and yeah, it’s going to be difficult, but it’s going to be more difficult if we don’t start now. People have been told over and over that alternatives can’t possibly replace fossil fuels, and for some things that’s true, but it’s no reason to do nothing. It’s like people don’t have the ability to envision anything different than what we currently have.
HH: That’s certainly true of most people. One of the things I’ve been doing is promoting the investment newsletters that look at real alternatives that do exist. When I wrote Politics for the Solar Age there weren’t any alternative energy companies to invest in and now this sector is outperforming the Dow. A couple of months ago I gave a keynote to the Institute of Noetic Sciences in a huge room in some watering hole in Palm Springs. These are all incredibly well-heeled people who are into spirituality and consciousness and who are aware that now is the time for bringing spirit into matter. And yet their investment portfolios don’t reflect this. I told them that it’s time to step up to the plate and restructure their portfolios, and gave them some examples of how they could do it. Not long ago these folks were resistant. But this time I got a standing ovation. Afterwards I received lots of calls and e-mails wanting to know how to invest in the green economy. Once they realized it’s possible, they’re onboard big time. Once this stuff begins to be noticed by Wall Street, it will be interesting to see if it will actually be reflected in the news. It’s already starting thanks to T. Bone Pickens, which is hilarious, really. But he has it pretty much right. We can’t drill our way out of this, alternatives are the answer, wind is our OPEC. People in this country live and die for money and Pickens is so rich, Congress is genuflecting to him and he’s making a big impact.
SML: In your latest book, Ethical Markets, you write about a venture fund for energy development that includes companies that focus on producing energy locally, regionally, based on what makes sense for that region. I love this idea because one of the things I feel we need to do is regionalize the national energy grid and become more energy self-reliant.
HH: Amory Lovins has been talking about it for years, and more recently the grid problem has become an important topic. I believe it can be solved a lot quicker than we might think. We currently spend $70 billion a year maintaining the grid. We might as well do it right. One of our TV shows on the subject clearly demonstrated how it was much more efficient to have smaller, local production of energy from local sources rather than putting it into the larger grid.
SML: And food too, what with all the tainted tomatoes and spinach and all, people are saying, “Well, we really need to eat locally”. Of course many of us have been saying this for years but now the public is finally getting it. More people know what community supported agriculture is now that just a few years ago.
HH: Yes. All of these macro-trends that point to failure are, in one way or another, driving people to healthier alternatives.
SML: True. If there’s anything good about climate change it’s going to make us aware of all the greenhouse gasses we’re putting in the environment and that we have to stop. It’s amazing how people’s patterns changed over such a short period of time once gas got over $4.00 a gallon. I’d hate to see prices drop and people go back to more wasteful patterns.
HH: I’ve been praying for $10.00/gallon gasoline for as long as I can remember (laughs). Of course if you really wanted to bring the price of gasoline down you could do it in 30 days by cracking down on speculators. That would be much more efficient than drilling. But my druthers would be that we keep gasoline at the world price, which is more like $8.00/gallon. In this society the price system is the main signaling system. You can’t use public education because the media and the Congress are tied up with special interests, so when push comes to shove, the price system works.
SML: As you know, one of the things I focused on in the mid-1980s and 1990s was fighting corporate control over our lives. Unfortunately corporations seem to have more control today than ever. And people feel powerless to change things. For most people, except those of us older than fifty or so, this is the way it’s pretty much always been. What will it take to transform it?
HH: Well, my timing has always been slightly off because I’ve always thought that this global casino that drives corporations would have to collapse long before this. In June 1997, I was at the UN giving a speech at a conference Gus Speth, then head of UNDP, had organized on governance. That was the very day the Thai bhat collapsed and the onset of the Asian meltdown that began that summer. The Thai delegation rushed up to me asking, “What is happening”? This was the first indication that the interlinkage we’ve created, this narrow global financial system with its very fast flows of currency, could bring down whole countries. In the next few days Indonesia went down, then the Philippines and Malaysia. The rest of that year and into the following year the GDP numbers of those countries were collapsing 30, 40, 50 percent. And instead of it bringing the sort of change I had always hoped for, it was mass confusion. People didn’t know who to be angry with. I remember being in South Korea right after that when the South Korean economy pretty much collapsed. There were all these lovely little ladies taking off their wedding rings and sending them off to the government to be melted down to shore up the gold supply in the central bank. Utter craziness, you know? Fast-forward to what’s been happening on Wall Street the last year. The financial system in the world has metastasized and become totally parasitic on the real economy. And it’s gotten worse and worse over the years to the point now where Wall Street is like a den of thieves. Today’s “crisis” is just about those illusory gains and now the illusory losses, because they never got the prices right by including all the social and environmental costs.
SML: And then we have the housing crisis that feeds into that.
HH: Right. There’s an incredibly good book by two very good investigative reporters called Chain of Blame (2008). They document very carefully that it was Wall Street that created the housing crisis. And what they were doing was shoveling money and loans out to these little non-bank loan brokerage firms and telling them, “Okay, go out and push as many mortgages as you can and if they’re subprime so much the better because they’re a higher interest rate.” They were running these kinds of almost bucket shops. It was all done as piecework, they’d have to do one an hour and if they got behind they were fired. It was like approve anything. Don’t worry. And so basically Wall Street was implicated in creating the whole thing. And once you have capital markets totally driven by greed, this is what happens.
SML: But then Wall Street has been like that for a very long time. It was one of the things I think socially responsible investing tried to deal with all those years ago. It did raise awareness but it didn’t go far enough for me, and it seems not all that much has changed.
HH: Well, yes. The encouraging thing is that even though it seems slow, social and environmental governance criteria are being forced into capital asset pricing models. I don’t expect to see any big shift in my lifetime – I’m 75 now. So you just have to keep on plugging. I just think how much worse it would be if we hadn’t all done what we did with SRI (socially responsible investing) 25 years ago.
SML: I hadn’t thought about that. And some of the same people are still plugging away at it. One of the things that surprises me is that a lot of the smaller scale, local enterprises that I wrote about in my newsletters and books are still around. Still, I thought that by now, which is like 20 plus years later, they would have had more of an impact in our local communities. And I haven’t seen that happening.
HH: I totally agree with you. That’s why I started Ethical Markets Media. I realized that the mainstream financial media, whose advertising was pretty much coming from the fossil fuel sector, would never cover the kinds of things we’re talking about except to jeer at it. Of course I never would have done it if I’d realized how impossibly difficult it was. Just as we were trying to go through the front door at PBS, Karl Rove was taking it over, putting all his Republican operatives on the board. So I realized we wouldn’t have the slightest chance. We were lucky to find an interesting little company run by two guys who used to be PBS station managers who had a network of progressive friends in PBS stations willing to take independent productions. That was how we got into 49 percent of the PBS stations. Now we’re licensing our shows all over the world. And we’re getting a lot of play at colleges, universities, and libraries in North America. We’re also in Brazil, London, and soon we’ll be in South Korea, where they just published my book.
SML: In this country we have a tendency to think that the United States is the whole world when, in fact, we’re not and the rest of the world is ahead of us. It’s just amazing.
HH: This is one of the problems I have with this culture. Of course it’s partly because we’re snowed by the media. We don’t get the real story. In the rest of the world they have much more robust public media than we do, and the level of political discourse is an order of magnitude higher than here where we get mostly crap coming at us all the time. Here at Ethical Markets Media we’re doing what we can to change this. And it really amuses me that here I am running a global company out of my garage.
SML: Earlier you mentioned integrating spirit into matter. For years now I’ve believed that’s where we’re at right now at this point in time as far as the evolution of consciousness and why human beings are here in the first place. It’s one of the beliefs that keeps me going when things seem impossible. That it’s not just human beings forcing our will on whatever, we are part of a much larger picture of consciousness than most people would want to believe.
HH: It’s the same for me. Feeling that I’m part of the living cosmos that’s unfolding is what makes it reasonable for me to get up every day and do what I do. Also, though it seems that the changes we’re working for are so slow in coming, glacial at times, if you look back over the last thirty years a lot has changed. When I started Citizens for Clean Air in New York in 1964, there was no Environmental Protection Agency, nobody knew the word “pollution”, hardly anyone used the word “environment”. You have to look at it that way. And also remember that it takes a lifetime to change a paradigm