CREATING ALTERNATIVE FUTURES

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From Creating Alternative Futures: The End of Economics by Hazel Henderson, copyright 1978 by Princeton Center for Alternative Futures, Inc., and reprinted by permission of Berkley Publishing Corporation, 200 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y. 10016. Available in paperback ($4.95) from any good bookstore.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy has called Hazel Henderson "a unique contemporary pioneer in the effort to humanize modern science and technology".

E.F. Schumacher once stated, "Mrs. Henderson's essays—every one of them—have more 'reality' than almost any other writings on societal problems I know."

And Jacques-Yves Cousteau has said of Hazel Henderson's collected writings, "in this book are most of the ideas we are fighting for. Anybody longing for a better life must read it."

And just who is this Hazel Henderson that all these people are talking about? She's an internationally published thinker, activist, and a founder of many public interest (particularly environmental) organizations . . . who, perhaps, sees things more clearly than most of today's Establishment "leaders" because she's never attended a day of college in her life.

Furthermore—with her husband, Carter F. Henderson—Hazel currently directs the Princeton Center for Alternative Futures, Inc. . . . a deliberately small and independent think tank.

Mrs. Henderson is also a director of the Council on Economic Priorities and of the Worldwatch Institute, a member of the U.S. Association for the Club of Rome, an advisor to The Cousteau Society and to the Environmental Action Foundation, and a member of the Advisory Council of the U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment.

And here—for those of you not already acquainted with her provocative point of view—is a sampling from Mrs. Henderson's newly published collected writings: Creating Alternative Futures.

There are many signs, both physical and metaphysical, that industrial cultures are breaking down. But I want to emphasize that the breakdown of an old culture can also signify a needed breakthrough. Times of crisis, as the Chinese say, are times of both danger and opportunity.

From ecological theory, we know that all biological systems (including human societies and those abstractions they call their "economies") involve continuous cycles of entropy and syntropy: the breaking down and building up of structure and the constant recycling of the detritus that releases the nutrients for new growth, synthesis, and evolution. So let us now look at what is being born: the emerging, regenerative, "counter-economy" now beginning to grow amid the old industrial systems.