Jonathon Porritt is a sustainability campaigner and writer (website, Twitter, Wikipedia). After years in the Green Party (while working full-time as a teacher), in 1984 he became director of Friends of the Earth in Britain and then co-founded Forum for the Future in 1996. (One of the other co-founders was Paul Ekins, who I interviewed for Powerful Times here. I worked with Jonathon when I was at Forum, 2003-2016.)
Jonathon was also Chair of the UK Sustainable Develop Commission for nine years (2000-2009) and Chancellor of Keele University (2012-2022).
He has been at the forefront of sustainability, in business and also government, for the last 30 years. We spoke in November 2023, just after he had, in his own words, extricated himself from the roles which had been very present in that time, including stepped back from any role in Forum.
For Jonathon, at the heart of sustainable development is this very simple, but massively powerful notion of intergenerational justice. That is still provides the rationale for everything that he does and allows him to envision ways in which 8 billion today and 10 billion people in the future could live reasonably good lives in the future.
One telling reflection: a focus on positive solutions for the last 30 years has put Jonathon’s anger on hold, and he now feels that has been problematic. He’s moving back into campaigning, being less reasonable with those who deserve our anger, and also still constantly absorbing in the solutions to the problems we face.
Listen
Links
Brundtland Commission definition of sustainable development:
“Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
Jonathon’s latest book, Hope in Hell.
Timings
00:56 – Q1. What are you doing now? And how did you get there?
3:55 -Q2. What is the future you are trying to create, and why?
7:35 – Q3. What are your priorities for the next few years, and why?
10:31 – Q4. If someone was inspired to follow those priorities, what should they do next?
14:00 Q5. If your younger self was starting their career now, what advice would you give them?
19:37 – Q6. Who would you nominate to answer these questions, because you admire their approach?
22:36 – Q7. Is there anything else important you feel you have to say?
Quotes
“The intergenerational bit [of sustainable development] is kind of relegating it to something unapologetic postscript for me. The justice agenda that really comes first not as an alternative to the intergenerational kind of justice story, but the intergenerational stuff comes first for me. And that’s at the heart of sustainable development. It’s what makes sustainable development. Such a difficult concept is why the politicians have made such a total pig’s ear of it over 30 years or more. And that is still provides the rationale for everything that I do and allows me to envision ways in which 8 billion today and 10 people in the future could live reasonably good. daily lives in the future, can be a bit careful in my choice of adjectives as it gets harder and harder to define exactly how good that future life is likely to be.”
“I do need to stop doing corporate sustainability work, which I’ve done since the inception of the forum. I greatly admire what leading companies continue to do today. But honestly, it’s not going to change things very much. Those companies are strictly limited what they can do, because of the current rules of the current capitalist game, their primary duty is to their shareholders, their fiduciary duties, governments don’t change the rules of the game.”
“The question becomes why spend a lot of time but a lot more time now that I can see what the barriers to change look like from that perspective. So start finish that and to address myself then more to a set of campaigning priorities to try and get the rules of the game changed more fundamentally, that’s basically what I will be doing are basically doing that through campaigning work.”
Priorities:
- Nuclear power (a waste of time and money).
- Population and family planning.
- Electoral reform, especially proportional representation.
- Conservation volunteers.
- Climate and young campaigners.
“Because if anybody is still in the position of asking that question [on what to do about climate], then they’re not awake, or they’re lazy. And by lazy, I mean, they’re not doing the work for themselves.”
Advice to younger self: get angrier earlier.
“I would be advising us to get angrier earlier. I, although party and friends, yes. There was a lot of very deep concern and anger about the ways in which people were doing it and other people. Even back in those days, it wasn’t, it wasn’t anger born of the full realisation of the spirit of the damage we would do. And for me, now, anger is a pretty critical mix in the whole story about emotional resources to address the predicament we’re in now. And I sometimes think that when I came back from the Earth Summit in 1992, and was determined to try to find different ways of tapping into people’s creative energies emphasising solutions morning… I know that the emphasis on that positive side solutions oriented was really important for me personally, and I think for an organisation like the forum, but it meant that I put my anger slightly on hold for the best part of 30 years. And I feel that been problematic. It’s not that I wasn’t aware of what was happening at every point. And the people that are going one might direct that anger. But now one confronts the two emergencies, climate and ecological emergencies in the fully advanced state they’re in at the moment. And boy, it is despairing that this has happened on our watch. So for me thinking back to my time as a, as a campaigner, I was always very reasonable night, basically. And I think I should have been a bit less unreasonable and slightly nastier.”
“my life is sort of nicely balanced between the anger and constant absorption in the solutions to the problems we face….I hope I can keep that balance.”
David Bent 