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Revisiting Hazel Henderson’s ‘Politics of the Solar Age

  • Geoffrey Holland
  • Jun 11
  • 3 min read

Updated: 6 days ago

By Geoffrey Holland



In a world emersed in severe ecological overshoot, extreme economic inequality, and the unraveling of social trust, few scholars have offered such a compelling alternative to our current reality than Hazel Henderson. Her 1981 book, The Politics of the Solar Age, anticipated many of the ideas now emerging in mainstream policy discourse; from redefining economic indicators to transitioning to clean renewable energy, from valuing unpaid labor to reshaping global governance. More than a critique, Henderson’s work remains a philosophical and practical blueprint for planetary renewal.


This essay explores Hazel Henderson’s vision by weaving together her most essential insights. She makes a compelling case for transforming how humanity measures progress, for how we organize society, and for encouraging a human commitment to responsible EarthCare. 


At the heart of Hazel Henderson’s work is a searing critique of traditional economics. She argues that the neoclassical economic model is not just outdated, it is dangerously divorced from physical, social, and ethical reality. Rooted in 18th-century Newtonian mechanics and 19th-century industrial advancement, our current economics treats the world as a machine governed by fixed laws of supply, demand, and consumption. Yet, the real world is far more complex. The real world is composed of living systems, not cold steel and linear equations.


Hazel Henderson famously wrote that “economics is a form of brain damage”, a biting indictment of a discipline that ignores its ecological foundations. By privileging money and market transactions, economists exclude what matters most: the unpaid care economy, healthy ecosystems, and human well-being. The result is a distorted worldview in which Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is treated as synonymous with ‘progress’, even if that progress comes with climate change, disease, and the collapse of the planet’s living biosystems.


Hazel Henderson urges us to embrace a new compass; one that is grounded in systems theory, ecology, and ethical values. Economics must evolve away from an industrial design to a Gaian model, one that views the Earth as a self-regulating, living organism. Humans are an essential part of that Gaian organism. We are obligated to commit ourselves to planetary stewardship.


The title of Hazel Henderson’s book is more than a metaphor; it is a call for a civilizational-scale shift from the fossil-fueled scarcity model to what she calls the Solar Age. In her view, the Industrial Age has been powered by nonrenewable energy sources—coal, oil, and natural gas—that centralize economic power; dirty fuels that cause geopolitical conflict while at the same time flooding Earth’s biosphere with every kind of human waste. The energy of the Solar Age, by contrast, is defined by clean, decentralized, and plentiful democratized energy.


In Hazel Henderson’s Solar Age, energy is abundant and produced locally. Solar panels on rooftops, community wind farms, and bioregional food systems empower people to meet their needs without relying on distant corporations or on foreign oil. This shift in the energy base, she argues, is not merely technical advancement, it is deeply political. Fossil fuels concentrate power in the hands of a rich and powerful few; Henderson’s clean, renewable energy paradigm distributes power equitably and fairly.


The transition to the Solar Age also entails a cultural shift: from self-interest to cooperation, from economic extraction to regeneration, from patriarchy to gender-equal partnership. As Hazel Henderson sums it, “the Sun gives us more energy in an hour than the world uses in a year. The scarcity is not in energy—it is in vision.”


One of Hazel Henderson’s most impactful contributions to humanity is her advocacy for alternative indicators of cultural progress. She was among the first to offer a robust critique of GDP as a misleading metric that conflates economic activity, profit, and political power with human progress. GDP, she notes, invariably rises with war, pollution, crime, and disease—but GDP ignores unpaid labor, environmental consequences, and social division 


Hazel Henderson’s Politics of the Solar Age remains a touchstone for those seeking to reshape society to be in harmony with our living biosphere. That is not some kind of utopian fantasy, but in fact is a pragmatic, deeply informed, roadmap for navigating the 21st century’s looming planetary-scale threats.


As we enter what may be called the Politics of the Hydrogen Age—an era marked by a massive clean energy transition, a transformative brand of regenerative agriculture, and expanding global interdependence—Hazel Henderson’s insights are more relevant than ever. Her work invites us to reclaim economics as a moral imperative, and to align AI and other advancing technologies so they function compatibly with our planet’s living systems. 

In words that Hazel Henderson lived by: “We are all economists now—because we all share one planet.”

 
 
 

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