Jonathon Porritt

Love, Anger & Betrayal

What good is persuasion if no oneis paying attention? Why Just Stop Oil's resolute young campaigners chose civildisobedience.The climate crisis deepens with terrifying predictability. Meanwhile, manyof the young campaigners who seek to wake us up to the truth of this, throughpeaceful direct action, are silenced and stuck in prison.They do not see themselves as brave heroes, nor as dangerousextremists; they do care about science and the role it should play ingovernment policy. As their personal profiles in the book reveal, their civildisobedience is driven by desperation, but motivated primarily by love - forthose who have already felt the impact of a radically changing climate and forthose whose lives will be blighted in the future, often in countries which havedone least to cause the crisis.Misrepresented and often reviled in the media, Just Stop Oil and other'Radical Flank' environmental campaigners will be deservedly recognised infuture, just as the Suffragettes have been, for the crucially important rolethey continue to play in the climate movement. Theirs is a generationsystematically betrayed by politicians. And by all of us who allow this tocontinue, on our watch, year after year.Six years on from the biggest climate protest in history in 2019, ledby Greta Thunberg, young people remain largely shut out of ever moredysfunctional political processes, able only to beg for the scraps of a 'justtransition' that would at best mitigate the coming devastation, much of whichis now unavoidable.Just Stop Oil stopped active campaigning in March 2025. But for mostof its remarkable young activists, the work of civil resistance goes on. Theycontinue to shoulder the burden of attempting to secure change in a worldlocked into a deeply damaging status quo.Jonathon Porritt spent a year working with twenty-six Just Stop Oilcampaigners to co-create Love, Anger & Betrayal, driven by a fiercecommitment to Intergenerational Justice. The campaigners feel part of theinterlinked chain of humanity, empathising more powerfully with futuregenerations than so many of us, even when many of them may well decide never tohave children of their own.