Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy

by Hazel Henderson, Simran Sethi

With insight, clarity, warmth, and enthusiasm Hazel Henderson announces the mature presence of the green economy. Mainstream media and big business interests have sidelined its emergence and evolution to preserve the status quo.

Throughout Ethical Markets Henderson weaves statistics and analysis with profiles of entrepreneurs, environmentalists, scientists, and professionals. Based on interviews conducted on her longstanding public television series, these profiles celebrate those who have led the highly successful growth of green businesses around the world.

Ethical Markets is the ultimate sourcebook on today's thriving green economy.

Genres: Economics

300 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2007

About the author

Hazel Henderson (born 1933 in Bristol, England) is a futurist and an economic iconoclast. In recent years she has worked in television, and 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.


BOOKS

Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2006, ISBN 978-1-933392-23-3
Daisaku Ikeda coauthor, Planetary Citizenship, Middleway Press, 2004, ISBN 978-0-9723267-2-8, 256 pgs
Hazel Henderson et al., Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators, Calvert Group, 2000, ISBN 978-0-9676891-0-4, 392 pgs
Beyond Globalization. Kumarian Press, 1999, ISBN 978-1-56549-107-6, 88 pgs
Building a Win-Win World. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 1995, ISBN 978-1-57675-027-8, 320 pgs
Creating Alternative Futures. Kumarian Press, 1996, ISBN 978-1-56549-060-4, 430 pgs (original edition, Berkley Books, NY, 1978)
Hazel Henderson et al., The United Nations: Policy and Financing Alternatives. Global Commission to Fund the United Nations, 1995, ISBN 978-0-9650589-0-2, 269 pgs
Paradigms in Progress. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 1995, ISBN 978-1-881052-74-6, 293 pgs (original edition, Knowledge Systems, 1991)
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 978-0-942850-24-6, 99 pgs
The Politics of the Solar Age. Knowledge Systems Inc., 1988, ISBN 978-0-941705-06-6, 433 pgs (original edition, Doubleday, NY, 1981

Reviews

[Nikki · Rating 1 out of 5]

Though she is an optimist (and that's awesome since so many save-the-environment books make you convinced that you can't), she's not a great writer. She meanders. She spends considerable time talking about women and does a, hoorah, women! Then talks about poorer nations developing, again with a hoorah! But I didn't feel I learned anything. And certainly nothing about the new green economy. It was like watching a commercial for one of the presidential candidates. Apparently, they're all supporting good teeth and change and Americanism, whatever that it. She probably supports those things, too. It's verbose pinpointing of several success stories regarding greater environmental concern, gender advancement, or sometimes just "generally morals." But it's too broad in its scope, for one, and completely unscientific for another. She'll tell one story and paint conclusion for three pages as if the story of one company is the story of millions. I don't feel I have a hold on "the green economy."

[Colin Bruce Anthes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great to read now, nearly 20 years later, to see which sources of optimism played out and which did not. Ultimately, the obstacles preventing change that Henderson identifies near the top were also too closely related to the more ethical business interests she hoped were driving that change. What we were really witnessing, one might conclude, were not ethical businesses but ethical *consumers and citizens* very ready to use ethical markets. Those consumers and citizens were betrayed by the real existing markets and the unethical businesses cloaking themselves in greenwashing.
Hazel Henderson was brilliant and tireless to the end, and there is much to learn from her body of work. Indeed, she was driven by the knowledge that a world valuing wellbeing over arbitrary measures of economic growth and with widespread renewable energy was possible and even, for most people, convenient. Unfortunately, her hope that big business could be part of the solution left her in a state of perpetual disappointment.

[Austin High]

338.9 HEN