Jonathon Porritt is an eminent writer and campaigner on sustainable development. For the last 30 years, Jonathon has provided strategic advice to leading UK and international companies to deepen their understanding of today’s converging environmental and climate crises. He is also focused on intergenerational justice, supporting young people in their activities around sustainable development issues as they face a future defined by the twin crises of the Climate Emergency and Biodiversity Emergency.
He is President of The Conservation Volunteers and is involved in the work of many other NGOs and groups. In 1996, he co-founded Forum for the Future, a leading international sustainable development charity, working with business and civil society to accelerate the shift toward a sustainable future. Porritt was formerly Co-Chair of the Green Party (1980-83) and Director of Friends of the Earth (1984-90). He stood down as Chair of the UK Sustainable Development Commission in 2009, after nine years providing high-level advice to Government Ministers, and served a ten-year term as Chancellor of Keele University (2012-2022).
Porritt was awarded a CBE in January 2000 for services to environmental protection.
Porritt’s upcoming book is Love, Anger & Betrayal, (Mount House Press,17 July 2025) in which he examines the background of the Just Stop Oil and supplies profiles and testimonials of 26 activists who ended up serving prison sentences for their part in the protest movement. His previous book, Hope in Hell (Simon & Schuster, 2020, revised 2021) is a powerful ‘call to action’ on the Climate Emergency.
Porritt will be speaking at Common Home – London at UCL on May 21st. Invitation only – let us know if you want to attend.
Thank you so much for this interview – let’s begin by talking about what you’re working on now…
I’ve spent the last year working with 26 of Just Stop Oil’s younger campaigners. Together, we’ve written a book (Love, Anger & Betrayal). The ‘love’ in the title is almost all theirs, articulated so movingly for those whose lives have already been impacted by climate change, and for all those hundreds of millions for whom the impacts will progressively worsen; the ‘anger’ is mostly mine; and the ‘betrayal’ – well, that’s right out there right now, as young people start to see how their future has been stripped bare, de-natured, closed down in so many different ways. What I describe in the book as the most consequential act of intergenerational injustice there has ever been.
What is causing this intergenerational injustice?
Let’s start with those forces in society today which ensure that the vast majority of people remain immured in a state of relative (and, often, complete) ignorance: the fossil fuel industry, now triumphantly celebrating the fruits of decades of systematic misinformation; the serried ranks of self-serving and often corrupt politicians; the right wing media in all their terrifying, toxic power; and (the last of my “four harbingers of the coming climate apocalypse”), most of today’s mainstream environmental organisations – who really do know the truth about the climate, but whose strategy, even now as breakdown looms, is still to double down on decades of demonstrably ineffective tactics.
Love, Anger & Betrayal will be out in July – my small but I hope not insignificant attempt to tell their truth, and through them, the truth about the climate crisis.
What was the impact of Just Stop Oil, and will it be missed?
Over the last three years, Just Stop Oil’s campaigns have forced politicians and the media to confront the reality of the climate emergency, have exposed the massive gap that exists between what climate scientists are telling us and the pathetically inadequate response to that science from the politicians, and have challenged all of us to “stop standing by” – by leaving to others the hard grind of climate campaigning.
Whilst its resources have been tiny, its impact has been huge. And the burden of making that happen has fallen on relatively small numbers of people prepared to put their freedom on the line – despite increasingly oppressive new legislation restricting our rights to protest and to freedom of speech here in the UK.
Are our governments complicit?
In any sane world, with evidence-based policymaking, Ministers would make rational decisions (for example, nuclear versus tidal), and make a rational decision, with taxpayers, energy security and cost-effective decarbonisation all properly taken into account.
But we don’t live in such a world.
Decision-making on energy policy is neither dispassionate not even remotely transparent, partly because the Government’s pro-nuclear obsession is all wrapped up in the UK’s strategic need to “maintain the strongest possible nuclear industry here in the UK”. And that’s primarily to underpin our so-called ‘independent’ nuclear deterrent. In the final reckoning, decisions taken here are more about kilotons rather than kilowatts.
Labour has morphed into an utterly despicable neoliberal clone. As such, it is as irrelevant to the needs and aspirations of the UK’s exhausted citizens as are the Tories in their hopefully unstoppable death spiral.
So – Trumpism spreads around the world? What are your thoughts about Trump vis-a-vis the United Kingdom?
The shadow cast by Trump’s second presidency is so overwhelming that the shadow cast by the Starmer/Reeves government over the last few weeks has gone inadequately remarked upon.
In both countries, social injustice is killing people on a grand scale. And the UK is now a very bad country to be poor in.
In both countries, women and children are disproportionately affected. Never forget that there are a million children living in destitution here in the UK.
In both countries, the cruel grip of neoliberalism goes all but unchallenged, turbocharged by a new oligarchy of the super-rich and the media they own and control.
I keep asking myself how long it will take Labour MPs to remember that they have a backbone, personally, and that their Party once stood for something, collectively.
Without social justice at its heart, Labour is nothing.
You recently co-authored a report “Exodus Equator: One Billion On The Move” – what were the key findings?
The principal objective of this paper is to raise awareness of the global humanitarian and ecological crises that will be caused by the forced displacement of up to 1 billion people by 2050 – as a direct consequence of accelerating climate change. This constitutes an unparalleled humanitarian catastrophe. The scale of it (measured not just in millions but in billions of devastated lives) seems incomprehensible – impossible to grasp. Most are numbed by such numbers. Our refusal to engage represents a further betrayal of future generations.
The Far Right is successfully “weaponising” immigration, leaving Progressives and the Left struggling to find a coherent, compassionate narrative. We have to confront this reality now – whilst we still have a chance of substantively mitigating what will otherwise be the worst humanitarian disaster in the history of humankind.
Why are our kids stepping up – in protests, in acts of civil disobedience – while their parents are still largely invisible?
My whole life has been driven by the idea of Intergenerational Justice, captured in this very familiar definition of sustainable development: “development that meets the needs of the present in a way that does not compromise the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.
Today the whole notion of Intergenerational Justice has been turned on its head. Instead of older generations doing everything they can to ensure a better, more secure future for all those who come after them, today’s younger generation finds itself doing a lot of the heavy lifting to secure a still liveable future not just for themselves, but for their parents and grandparents.
Remember sustainable development? You may not have heard much about it over the last 14 years, given that the Tories did everything in their power to excise it from our political lexicon to ensure that nothing should stand in the way of the same old exploitative, planet-trashing development so beloved of today’s political classes. (And Labour is no better on that score, by the way).
What do you think about this sorry state of governance?
I’ve come to the conclusion that most of us are now afflicted by SSDD – Severe Selective Deafness Disorder.
Test out your own hearing by assessing how you respond to this one single data point from the climate frontline – regarding the number of days where the average sea surface temperature exceeded 21°C (average sea surface temperatures drive much of our global climate).
So, what are you doing with that data? Parking it? Ignoring it? Or really hearing it? Whilst realising that there are many data points at least as shocking as this.
Many young people today can barely believe these data points are proliferating across the entire climate frontline. Yet our politicians are still struck dumb – through ignorance, inertia, cowardice, “psychic numbing”, or downright self-serving dishonesty and corruption – just follow the fossil fuel money that gets them elected and keeps them in power.
This dereliction of duty leaves many young climate campaigners both angry and utterly grief-bound – a cruel form of anticipatory grief as they contemplate the horror story that awaits hundreds of millions of people in their lifetimes. INEVITABLY.
We’re out of time.
Anticipatory grief does not go away, or even recede – as is the case (one hopes) with the death or loss of a loved one. It repeats endlessly, day after day. Far from being the “great healer”, time becomes exactly the opposite, as every day wasted in denial or delay further diminishes our prospects of avoiding the kind of personal and collective trauma looming larger and larger.
Time doesn’t heal climate grief. Indeed, it steals the dreams and hopes of us all. But especially the dreams and hopes of young people.
No wonder the kids have had enough. It’s time we all stood up.
Thanks – and we look forward to Love, Anger & Betrayal. And thank you for all you do.
INTERVIEW by Christian Sarkar