Review by Peter Reason
Sir Jonathon Espie Porritt, 2nd Baronet, CBE, Eton and Oxford; one might imagine him as a pillar of the British Establishment. Then you remember he was co-founder of the Ecology (now Green) Party, Director of Friends of the Earth, co-founder of Forum for the Future, inaugural Chair of the Labour government’s Sustainable Development Commission, patron of Population Matters, and engaged in many, many other significant ecological and sustainability activities. All to little avail, given the dire state of the planet, as he himself confesses. And so you might wonder (as I did for a brief moment) whether this book is a sad case of a failed and aging environmentalist (Porritt is seventy-five) leaping on a youthful bandwagon.
You would not be further from the truth. Love, Anger and Betrayal is one of the most hard-hitting books on the science and politics of climate change I have read.
The book features personal profiles of twenty-six young Just Stop Oil activists Porritt has got to know personally and in some depth: ‘I’ve interviewed them all, read about them extensively, followed some in detail as their legal process unfolded, visited some in prison and have got to know some as friends… It’s been a privilege to be able to do something at this age that has profoundly changed the way I see the world’.
These profiles show how they understand the current climate predicament and what it is that moves them to take the radical action they do. They are articulate, well-informed, and deeply moving to read. They take you up close and personal to the perspectives and motives of young people who are risking much – freedom, reputation, family relations, careers – in conventional terms. These young people do not see themselves as ‘brave’ or ‘beacons of hope’, nor as ‘eco-zealots’ or ‘dangerous extremists’. Rather, they see themselves as people who care about science and the role science should play in politics. Reading their profiles as they take their place remorselessly through the book, I realized that, once you fully follow the science of the trajectory of the climate catastrophe, once you confront the utter failure of the powers that be to address it, once you realize how truly bleak and frightening is your future, and once you take the first practical step outside the taken-for-granted norms of life in an industrial society, then systematic radical activism is for many the next necessary step.
As activist Avery Simmard puts it, her motivation is ‘a mixture of immense rage, love and inspiration. It seems that the strongest and most consistent emotion I feel is rage – rage about the endless injustices of the world, the systemic inequality, the denial and wilful ignorance of politicians and media. This simmering rage keeps me going, but it grows from the seeds of love. I find myself in frequent awe of life on this planet, and love for the people around me, and the things I am able to experience.’
These activist profiles are interweaved with reflective chapters authored by Porritt – it is the interweaving of these voices that gives the book much of its power. The first chapter addresses the reality of betrayal – the absolute and repeated failure of the political system to address how ‘the terrifying impacts of climate disruption are proliferating’ and the political response through ‘ignorance, inertia, cowardice or downright self-serving dishonesty and corruption’. Porritt writes how he was forced to ‘confront the full extent of today’s ongoing intergenerational injustice’, a notion that has ‘been turned on its head’ so that ‘today’s younger generation finds itself doing a lot of the heavy lifting to secure a still liveable future not just for themselves but their parents and grandparents’.
The second chapter, On the Front Line, explores the nature of activism. While the public media offer a tired and weary debate about whether we should believe in ‘global warming’, and/or whether the technology solar power will ‘save us’, the science points to a more and more unstable climate. Meanwhile, the campaign for moderate and incremental change has simply not been effective. Porritt, having been at the centre of this, confesses, ‘We are looking back at over more than thirty years of near complete failure’; and ‘We know we have failed more than we have succeeded, a failure which I and many others share, for having relied on a theory of change – gradual, consensus driven incremental change – that now stands undeniably exposed’. Back in my teaching days, I had students read Porritt’s book, Capitalism: As if the world mattered[i]. Now it is the ruthlessly extractive, exploitative and imperial nature of capitalism and the political system with which it is entangled that is firmly in the dock.
Porritt argues that in these circumstances an extreme form of protest has become essential. What he calls Radical Flank involves ‘a small number of people using confrontational, unpopular and often illegal tactics [to] create additional space for more moderate campaigners to make the case for change within the system’. This form of extremism has a rich historical lineage: the Suffragettes split away from the mainstream National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies; and then later the Suffragettes themselves split with the increasingly violent tactics of Emmeline Pankhurst and others engaged in a guerrilla war with the government of the day. Similarly, Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference positioned themselves as the Radical Flank to the more conservative National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, and King was outflanked in turn by the more radical flank represented by Malcolm X, Angela Davis, the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam.
The Radical Flank may or may not be effective. The historical evidence suggests it has a part of play in opening a wider agenda for public debate, but the arguments for and against its effectiveness are mixed. But debates about theory and change must not be allowed to obscure the moral convictions that drive those involved in non-violent direct action. Nor should they obscure the reality that the UK has become ‘one of the most authoritarian democracies in the world with regard to undermining the right to protest and freedom of speech’. Porritt makes his case very strongly: referring to recent legislation he writes, ‘It’s hard not to see these legal constraints and sanctions as anything other than politically motivated. It’s hard not to see the judiciary in this country as having been fundamentally compromised by this politicisation. And it’s hard not to see those who have been incarcerated as anything other than political prisoners…’ Whether you agree with him or not, Porritt has the courage of his convictions: he was arrested in August of this year for his part in the protests in support of proscribed organization Palestine Action (see e.g. https://jonathonporritt.com/arrested-for-opposing-genocide/).
I realize I have written 1,000 words and not got past Chapter Two. I think this reflects the rich content and profound relevance of this book, into which Porritt has poured his decades of experience as a writer and leading environmentalist. One of the founding pioneers of the environmental movement, Aldo Leopold, wrote over sixty years ago in A Sand County Almanac, ‘One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds’. [ii] Just as this book confronts the reader with the distress of young activists, so one senses Porritt’s anguish at the failure of so much of his life’s work to make the kind of difference that is needed.
Porritt’s anguish is there to see, but he doesn’t indulge it, rather gives that of the Just Stop Oil activists the higher profile. Hanan Ameur, who along with Harrison Donnelly, threw paint at The Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery, says, ‘All I can really say is that it’s deeply annoying that I have to go and smash up a screen in front of a painting and get myself arrested just to persuade more people to start listening to what the scientists are saying about the climate crisis. That’s the bottom line here: why are so few people today, even now, focused on that scientific advice?’
Yet Porritt’s perspective is a continued and important counterpoint. He reviews climate science (the situation is far worse that we can imagine); and shows the failure of politics (both generally, ‘The harsh truth is that politicians are making at catastrophically bad job of addressing this challenge – through scientific illiteracy… inertia… and through corruption of various degrees…’; and specifically, ‘Keir Starmer himself does not have a climate-friendly bone in his body). He writes of the ‘Fossil Fuel Incumbency’ as essentially a ‘global imperial power’, operating in every corner of the Earth, infiltrating and ‘capturing’ countries whether democracies, autocracies or failing states. He shows how Everything is Connected and impacted by the ‘engine of destruction’ that is extractive capitalism. How this has captured both politics and law in the outrageously repressive anti free speech legislation of the last two UK governments. And in a particularly powerful chapter, reflects on the Emotional Burden carried by the Just Stop Oil activists, the ‘landscape of grief’ that confronts us when ‘natural disasters’ of fire, flood, and landslide are manifestly ‘unnatural’, brought about in significant ways by anthropogenic action. Porritt reflects on the grief, loss and anger of the Just Stop Oil activists, and reports with astonishment how many of them see the politicians as ‘trapped in the same system’. As Avery Simmard and others tell us, their motivation starts from love.
I have to admit that this astonished me. Try as I might – which isn’t very hard these days! – I cannot find it in my heart to rationalise the vast majority of politicians indifference and inertia, let alone to forgive it. And the fact that the wholly corrupt nexus of interest between politicians, the fossil fuel industry and the media still goes on today, in so many different ways, still enrages me. It enrages me to the extent that I believe every single one of the young people interviewed for this book has been directly and systematically betrayed by today’s politicians…
For the most part, the young people do not share that rage. I felt constantly rebuked by their more balanced and tolerant gaze.
This book might be seen as an encounter between the wisdom and perspective of a battered and humbled elder and the courage and activism of youth. Each perspective informs the other, as happens in all genuine dialogue, for we can see both the wisdom and understanding held by the young activists and the courage of the genuine elder. Read this book to understand the perspective and motives of the young Just Stop Oil activists; and read it also for a deeply informed and integrated understanding of the climate catastrophe that is not just looming, that has already arrived.
[i] Porritt, J. (2005). Capitalism as if the World Matters. Earthscan.
[ii] Leopold, A. (1949). A Sand County Almanac. Oxford University Press.
Peter Reason is currently engaged in a series of experiential co-operative inquiries exploring living cosmos panpsychism: He has been regularly sitting with the River Avon and with invocation and ceremony addressing River as a community of sentient beings: “If I call to the world as sentient being, what response may I receive?” He is writing about this inquiry in at Learning How Land Speaks. He has just launched Objects&Lives, short writing and imagery reflecting on household and personal objects that hold value through the memories they hold and their associations with family and cultural history. His online presence is at peterreason.net.
Jonathan Porritt, Love, Anger & Betrayal (Mount House Press 2025) ISBN 9781912945542, paperback original, 288pp..
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