1096 words, 5-minute read
I’m on the London Underground. Reading a book. I look up to check the station. Clapham South. Dammit. I’ve missed my stop. I close the book - source of my distraction, engrossing doesn’t cut it - and cross platforms to head back upstream.
The book in question is ‘Love, Anger and Betrayal’, the latest from environmental campaigner Jonathon Porritt. Jonathon has been in the game a long time (he joined the Green Party in 1974 and has since covered every possible base in the environmental movement - and invented a few more besides), so what he says, matters.
In ‘Love, Anger and Betrayal’ he turns his attention to 26 young Just Stop Oil (JSO) campaigners, all of whom have been arrested for peaceful direct action and some of whom are in prison. In truth these 26 are Jonathon’s co-authors as each of them is given space to detail their involvement in JSO, their motivation, inspiration, relationship with nature, and hopes for the future. They also reflect in their own words on the chapter themes: climate science, taking direct action, confronting the law, the emotional burden of arrest and imprisonment etc.
It’s impossible and invidious to generalise about these extraordinary young people, but four things stand out for me. First, their selflessness; there is not an iota of self-aggrandisement on display here. Second, their surprise that not everyone sees things the way they do, when it’s so obvious that not changing course will lead us to perdition. Third, the equanimity with which they accept their punishment, not because the sentences are fair but because they believe they’re doing the right thing at the right time, and in that sense they’re where they have to be.
Fourth, the road travelled. Each and every one of these protestors has started near the bottom of the commitment escalator and ridden it to the top. From there they survey an uncertain future, both theirs and the planet’s, making sacrifices along the way (though they may not see them like that) that few of us would be willing to make. At some point in that uncertain future these young activists, vilified on all sides (including by those on the same side) will be recognised for the courageous, right-minded people they are.
These 26 campaigners are just a handful of those, young and old, who have fallen victim to the government’s determination to drive direct action from the streets of the UK. Successive governments - both Conservative and Labour - have passed legislation that makes it increasingly difficult to take action (even making a Zoom call) without being threatened with arrest. (Jonathon himself has fallen foul of legislation that makes supporting the currently proscribed group Palestine Action a criminal offence).
Historical comparisons are hard to avoid. Some of the activists, and Jonathon himself, cite the Suffragettes as a source of inspiration, and it’s a measure of the government’s duplicitous insincerity that the erstwhile Home Secretary Yvette Cooper can sickeningly dress up in Suffragette colours and then pass legislation proscribing Palestine Action which uses the same tactics as those that got Cooper the vote.
The environmental movement has a very broad front and practically every tactic has been used to try to turn round the juggernaut that is leading us to environmental and social disaster. Just Stop Oil, like Extinction Rebellion, is at the radical end of the spectrum (though does anyone remember monkeywrenching?)
I think it’s fair to say that Jonathon has spent most of his political life on the moderate flank: the Green Party, Director of Friends of the Earth, founder member of the sustainable development charity Forum for the Future. In the light of this, one of the most poignant passages in the book is this one:
‘There may well be a climate majority out there, just waiting for the right moment to show how much they care, to demonstrate how determined they are to see their elected representatives get a grip on this crisis. But I’ve spent more than fifty years trying to reach out to that majority of citizens, if only to mobilise a bigger minority of them, and I have no illusions left - about both my failure and theirs. If we continue to rely on the same old business-as-usual theory of change, the inevitable result will be that such a majority will be mobilised only when it is already too late to make any significant difference.’
And it’s for this reason that he ‘is deeply disappointed by all those mainstream climate campaigners and environmentalists who never spoke up in support of Just Stop Oil’. It’s said that we get more conservative with age. Jonathon seems to have taken the wrong potion. A combination of lived experience and over a year spent with these extraordinary young people looks to have placed him firmly on the radical flank.
In the context of UK environmental politics this is an important moment, because concerted calls for a ‘moderate flank’ are being made by significant figures in the environmental movement, aimed precisely at the ‘climate majority’ that Jonathon has spent 50 years trying and failing to reach. Can it be ‘both … and’ rather than ‘either … or’? Maybe, but time spent working on the moderate flank is time you can’t spend anywhere else.
What other options are there? Years ago a university colleague of mine pointed me towards the insurance industry. After all, he said, who thinks more about the future than them? Since then, insurance has come up over and over again as a weak spot in capitalism’s armoury, as the costs of insuring against future environmental disasters rise inexorably. (Most recently for me in John Vaillant’s magnificent and shocking ‘Fire Weather’).
Jonathon imagines a worst-ever hurricane season in Florida causing state-based insurance company bankruptcies, followed by a cascade of bankruptcies up the chain to the World Bank itself. ‘That’s the only way,’ he writes, ‘as I see it right now, in which today’s suicidal capitalist system turns out, against all the odds, and at absolutely the last possible moment, to be capable of rescuing itself from itself’. That’s quite a journey from Jonathon’s 2007 ‘Capitalism as if the World Matters’!
So perhaps, in the end, the Death Machine will chew itself up from the inside. Meanwhile, courageous young people, given voice here by Jonathon, are dragged through the Machine’s ‘justice system’, a system in which judges ludicrously demand that protestors show remorse before they pass sentence. ‘How could I be morally compelled to take action one week’, asks Indigo Rumbelow, ‘and then be filled with regret for acting the next?’
I’m on the London Underground. Reading a book. I look up to check the station. Clapham South. Dammit. I’ve missed my stop. I close the book - source of my distraction, engrossing doesn’t cut it - and cross platforms to head back upstream.
The book in question is ‘Love, Anger and Betrayal’, the latest from environmental campaigner Jonathon Porritt. Jonathon has been in the game a long time (he joined the Green Party in 1974 and has since covered every possible base in the environmental movement - and invented a few more besides), so what he says, matters.
In ‘Love, Anger and Betrayal’ he turns his attention to 26 young Just Stop Oil (JSO) campaigners, all of whom have been arrested for peaceful direct action and some of whom are in prison. In truth these 26 are Jonathon’s co-authors as each of them is given space to detail their involvement in JSO, their motivation, inspiration, relationship with nature, and hopes for the future. They also reflect in their own words on the chapter themes: climate science, taking direct action, confronting the law, the emotional burden of arrest and imprisonment etc.
It’s impossible and invidious to generalise about these extraordinary young people, but four things stand out for me. First, their selflessness; there is not an iota of self-aggrandisement on display here. Second, their surprise that not everyone sees things the way they do, when it’s so obvious that not changing course will lead us to perdition. Third, the equanimity with which they accept their punishment, not because the sentences are fair but because they believe they’re doing the right thing at the right time, and in that sense they’re where they have to be.
Fourth, the road travelled. Each and every one of these protestors has started near the bottom of the commitment escalator and ridden it to the top. From there they survey an uncertain future, both theirs and the planet’s, making sacrifices along the way (though they may not see them like that) that few of us would be willing to make. At some point in that uncertain future these young activists, vilified on all sides (including by those on the same side) will be recognised for the courageous, right-minded people they are.
These 26 campaigners are just a handful of those, young and old, who have fallen victim to the government’s determination to drive direct action from the streets of the UK. Successive governments - both Conservative and Labour - have passed legislation that makes it increasingly difficult to take action (even making a Zoom call) without being threatened with arrest. (Jonathon himself has fallen foul of legislation that makes supporting the currently proscribed group Palestine Action a criminal offence).
Historical comparisons are hard to avoid. Some of the activists, and Jonathon himself, cite the Suffragettes as a source of inspiration, and it’s a measure of the government’s duplicitous insincerity that the erstwhile Home Secretary Yvette Cooper can sickeningly dress up in Suffragette colours and then pass legislation proscribing Palestine Action which uses the same tactics as those that got Cooper the vote.
The environmental movement has a very broad front and practically every tactic has been used to try to turn round the juggernaut that is leading us to environmental and social disaster. Just Stop Oil, like Extinction Rebellion, is at the radical end of the spectrum (though does anyone remember monkeywrenching?)
I think it’s fair to say that Jonathon has spent most of his political life on the moderate flank: the Green Party, Director of Friends of the Earth, founder member of the sustainable development charity Forum for the Future. In the light of this, one of the most poignant passages in the book is this one:
‘There may well be a climate majority out there, just waiting for the right moment to show how much they care, to demonstrate how determined they are to see their elected representatives get a grip on this crisis. But I’ve spent more than fifty years trying to reach out to that majority of citizens, if only to mobilise a bigger minority of them, and I have no illusions left - about both my failure and theirs. If we continue to rely on the same old business-as-usual theory of change, the inevitable result will be that such a majority will be mobilised only when it is already too late to make any significant difference.’
And it’s for this reason that he ‘is deeply disappointed by all those mainstream climate campaigners and environmentalists who never spoke up in support of Just Stop Oil’. It’s said that we get more conservative with age. Jonathon seems to have taken the wrong potion. A combination of lived experience and over a year spent with these extraordinary young people looks to have placed him firmly on the radical flank.
In the context of UK environmental politics this is an important moment, because concerted calls for a ‘moderate flank’ are being made by significant figures in the environmental movement, aimed precisely at the ‘climate majority’ that Jonathon has spent 50 years trying and failing to reach. Can it be ‘both … and’ rather than ‘either … or’? Maybe, but time spent working on the moderate flank is time you can’t spend anywhere else.
What other options are there? Years ago a university colleague of mine pointed me towards the insurance industry. After all, he said, who thinks more about the future than them? Since then, insurance has come up over and over again as a weak spot in capitalism’s armoury, as the costs of insuring against future environmental disasters rise inexorably. (Most recently for me in John Vaillant’s magnificent and shocking ‘Fire Weather’).
Jonathon imagines a worst-ever hurricane season in Florida causing state-based insurance company bankruptcies, followed by a cascade of bankruptcies up the chain to the World Bank itself. ‘That’s the only way,’ he writes, ‘as I see it right now, in which today’s suicidal capitalist system turns out, against all the odds, and at absolutely the last possible moment, to be capable of rescuing itself from itself’. That’s quite a journey from Jonathon’s 2007 ‘Capitalism as if the World Matters’!
So perhaps, in the end, the Death Machine will chew itself up from the inside. Meanwhile, courageous young people, given voice here by Jonathon, are dragged through the Machine’s ‘justice system’, a system in which judges ludicrously demand that protestors show remorse before they pass sentence. ‘How could I be morally compelled to take action one week’, asks Indigo Rumbelow, ‘and then be filled with regret for acting the next?’
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