Hazel Henderson

Jean Hazel Henderson ( Mustard; 27 March 1933 – 22 May 2022) was a British American futurist and environmental activist.

As an autodidact in her twenties, having only a British high-school formal education, in the U.S. she gradually advanced, by virtue of groundbreaking citizen activism, into the roles of university lecturer and chair-holder, as well as that of advisor to corporations and government agencies.

She authored several books including Building a Win-Win World, Beyond Globalization, Planetary Citizenship (with Daisaku Ikeda), and Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy.

Henderson was born on 27 March 1933, in Bristol, Somerset, England, the daughter of Kenneth and Dorothy May ( Jesseman) Mustard.

She graduated from Clifton High School in 1950.

After graduating from Clifton High School, she worked as a saleswoman, hotel clerk, and telephone operator.

In 1957, Henderson moved to New York City with her husband.

She lived in an area of the city that was constantly covered in soot from garbage incinerators, forcing her to constantly wash the soot from her infant daughter.

Her many complaints to city hall went nowhere, prompting her and Carolyn Konheim, another concerned parent, to form Citizens for Clean Air.

The group made several early advances in clean air activism by lobbying for local, state, and federal pollution legislation.

The group is responsible for getting the air pollution index featured in weather reporting.

At its height, the group was composed of 20,000 members, with about 75 percent of them being women.

In 1957, she married Carter Henderson, a writer for The Wall Street Journal.

Together they had a daughter.

In the 1960s and 1970s, she wrote for Harvard Business Review.

In 1967, she was named "citizen of the year" by the New York County Medical Society.

She advised the Office of Technology Assessment and the National Science Foundation from 1974 to 1980.

She was Regent's Lecturer at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and held the Horace Albright Chair in Conservation at the University of California, Berkeley, and worked as a travelling lecturer and panelist.

They divorced in 1981.

In 1996, she received the Boston Research Center’s Global Citizen Award along with Adolfo Pérez Esquivel.

In 1996, she married Alan F. Kay, an internet pioneer and social entrepreneur who was the founder of the electronic Wall Street trading platform AutEx.

In 2004, Henderson started Ethical Markets Media, LLC, to disseminate information on green investing, socially responsible investing, green business, green energy, business ethics news, environmentally friendly technology, good corporate citizenship and sustainable development by making available reports, articles, newsletters and video gathered from around the world.

In 2007, Henderson published a book, Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy, which became the basis of the Ethical Markets television series on PBS.

She served on the boards of several publications, including Futures Research Quarterly, The State of the Future Report, E/The Environmental Magazine, Resurgence, and Foresight and Futures.

She was a member of the World Future Society, the National Press Club, the Association for Evolutionary Economics, and a fellow of the World Futures Studies Federation.

She was listed in Who's Who in the World, Who's Who in Science and Technology, and Who's Who in Business and Finance.

In 2007, Henderson was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Henderson was awarded Honorary Doctor of Science degrees from the University of San Francisco, Soka University, and Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

He died in 2016.

Henderson died of skin cancer at her home in St. Augustine, Florida, on 22 May 2022.