Jonathon Porritt
Sir Jonathon Espie Porritt, 2nd Baronet, CBE is a British environmentalist and writer. He is known for his advocacy of the Green Party of England and Wales. Porritt frequently contributes to magazines, newspapers and books, and appears on radio and television and has written a number of books including Hope in Hell: a decade to confront the climate emergency.
Created to highlight the impact of the worsening Climate crisis, Just Stop Oil ‘burst on the scene in a blaze of orange’ in March 2022, provoking extraordinary levels of controversy for its polarising tactics and attention-grabbing Non-Violent Direct Action. “The whole point of an action is that it’s meant to be disruptive – that’s what the media are interested in, what gets people talking about the crisis,” one young activist told me. “And the economic impact of the disruption puts direct pressure on the government.”
Three years on, with 350 of its supporters arrested, and around 180 more sentenced or held on remand, it called an end to its campaigning activities. “We’d deliberately settled on a winnable demand, with the clear intention that once won, the campaign would end,” another activist told me. JSO’s life may have been short, yet few, if any, campaigning organisations had achieved such a high profile – or such results – in such a short period of time. JSO’s uncompromising commitment to civil resistance undoubtedly contributed to the Labour government’s decision to end all new oil and gas developments in the North Sea.
I supported Just Stop Oil from the start. Whatever your opinion of its confrontational tactics, its insistence on exposing the lies and corruption at the heart of politics was a constant, vital challenge to mainstream environmentalists and more consensus-seeking climate campaigners.
Many young people today can scarcely believe the speed at which the terrifying impacts of climate disruption are proliferating. Yet the vast majority of politicians assert that ‘there’s nothing to see here’ – whether through ignorance, inertia, cowardice 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 uncomprehending and grief-struck as they contemplate the unavoidable horrors awaiting hundreds of millions of people in the decades to come. That kind of grief does not diminish with time. In fact far from being ‘the great healer’, time steals the dreams and hopes of all of us, but especially those of the young. “It’s sad that we’ve got to the point where people have almost forgotten about how rights work,” said another young activist, “and about rights not being given to you but having to be fought for.”
At the age of seventy-four, I’m fifty years older than most of the JSO supporters I interviewed for my new book about youth activism, Love, Anger and Betrayal. But my conversations with them forced me to confront the full extent of today’s ongoing intergenerational injustice – and profoundly changed the way I see the world. In a cruel inversion of previous relationships between the generations, in which older people strive to leave a better, safer future for those who come after them, it’s today’s young people who must do the heavy lifting to secure a still liveable future not just for themselves, but for their parents and grandparents.
Which is why I hope, almost against all hope, at this very late stage, that all those parents, grandparents and citizens deeply concerned about the future will find their own way of stepping up. Because when Martin Luther King said that ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice’, he sure as hell didn’t mean that justice will simply arrive, so sit back and wait for the happy outcome.
Such justice is never freely given by those who have power; it is only ever won. To quote Martin Luther King again, ‘Social progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of dedicated individuals.’
I know I shouldn’t be, but I’m astonished at the apparent lack of visible concern on the part of mainstream environmentalists as we slide inexorably into a police state. The right to peaceful protest remains a basic human right, but you wouldn’t know that here in the UK any longer.
When the maximum sentence for chaining yourself to railings is more than twice the maximum sentence for racially aggravated assault, anyone who cares about justice should be appalled. The draconian new laws introduced by the Conservatives and now shockingly defended by Labour government, ensure that non-violent protest is routinely treated as a more serious crime than most forms of violence. It isn’t just the young who are betrayed by what is going on here in the UK. It is every single one of us.
Historians often suggest that “civilisations fail when their elites can no longer agree on what threatens them.” Ironically, today’s elites do agree on what threatens them. What threatens them is the truth about the extraordinarily precarious situation that humankind finds itself in a quarter of the way through the twenty-first century.
That situation could still, even now, be transformed if citizens were able to share the truth about the oligarchs, billionaires, warmongers, and destroyers of hopes and dreams; the truth about the sheer physical impossibility of relying on economic growth, stretching indefinitely into the future, to improve the condition of humankind; the truth about our total dependence on the natural world to provide both for our material prosperity and for our well-being; the truth about all the inspiring economic and political alternatives that would allow fair, dynamic and sustainable communities to thrive the world over; and the truth, most importantly, about who we humans really are, a species with a much greater capacity for compassion, empathy, mutual respect, and for co-creating a better world for ourselves with all non-human life, than any of their assiduously cultivated tropes about “innate” selfishness, greed, competitiveness and devil-take-the-hindmost materialism would have us believe.
Ultimately, a proper understanding of those truths provides the only sure-fire defence we have against falling ever deeper into the very dark world that now confronts us. As he has done so often over the past decade, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres nailed this clear-cut moment of truth when he said: ‘We have a choice. Collective action or collective suicide. It is in our hands.’
We all have that choice. And it is now uncomfortably binary: action or suicide.
Jonathon Porritt is a renowned writer, campaigner, and consultant on sustainable development, with a strong focus on intergenerational justice and youth activism in response to the Climate and Biodiversity Emergencies. He co-founded Forum for the Future in 1996, an international charity working with businesses and civil society to drive sustainable change. A former Co-Chair of the Green Party (1980–83) and Director of Friends of the Earth (1984–90), he also chaired the UK Sustainable Development Commission for nine years, advising government ministers. From 2012 to 2022, he served as Chancellor of Keele University. Currently President of The Conservation Volunteers, Jonathon remains active across numerous NGOs. He was awarded a CBE in 2000 for services to environmental protection. His latest book, Hope in Hell, is a compelling call to action on the Climate Emergency.
Call to action: Just Stop Oil as an organisation may well have may well have ‘hung up the high viz’, but many of those involved in the organisation are still in active civil disobedience in one way or another. They still need our support, as do all those actively involved in campaigns to end the genocide in Gaza, and organisations like Defend Our Juries.