Sir Jonathon Porritt (born 1950) is a leading British environmentalist, author, and campaigner who has dedicated more than 50 years to advancing the green movement. The son of Lord Porritt, the 11th Governor-General of New Zealand, he inherited the title of 2nd Baronet in 1994. Over his career, he has combined grassroots activism with high-level advisory roles, helping to shape both the Green Party and Friends of the Earth.
Porritt has played a central role in promoting sustainability on a global scale, offering guidance to some of the world’s most influential leaders. He served for many years as a personal advisor to King Charles III, during his time as Prince of Wales, and co-founded the Prince of Wales’s Business and Sustainability Programme. Today, he continues to champion “intergenerational justice,” lending his support to youth-led movements such as Just Stop Oil, while holding governments and corporations accountable for their sustainability commitments.
1. You spent decades advising Prime Ministers and Kings from the inside. Now, you’re getting arrested at protests with groups like Palestine Action. Have you given up on changing the system from within, or do you think you need to be a “rebel” to actually get the government’s attention today?
It’s true that I am now using my time and energy very differently than I have been for the last 30 years. To go back, I first got involved in the 70s because then I was very active in the Green Party, standing as a candidate for the Green Party and doing a lot of political work. And then I became director of Friends of the Earth in 1984 and did a lot of radical campaigning work. So, to a certain extent, I guess this has been a circular journey, that I started in the more radical end of campaigning and politics. I spent 30 years advising the corporate sector and governments, and so on. And only now have I come back to more of a campaigning role in the work that I do. And I think that reflects the urgency that we now have to acknowledge. We’ve wasted so much time, so many decades, and things are now so serious that I feel me having a few more conversations with a few more businesses or a few more government ministers doesn’t make the difference that I would like to be able to make these days. So I’m happy to work with people who now take a more radical, perhaps confrontational stance, and acknowledge the importance of civil disobedience in the work that we do.
2. You once described Keir Starmer as not having a “climate-friendly bone in his body.” If you were to offer him a skeletal realignment, where would you start—the heart or the spine?
The heart. I’ve been disappointed by a lot of politicians during my life. As you can imagine, very few of them ever really understood the degree to which these huge physical environmental elements would shape politics all around the world, in every country, whether we’re talking about the rich world or the poor world, and so on. And unfortunately, Keir Starmer is one of those. He doesn’t believe that the way we shape our relationship with the natural world is critical to what he’s trying to achieve economically and socially. He doesn’t think it’s connected. He doesn’t believe that the environment plays an important part in economic, socioeconomic success or failure. And he’s completely obsessed with conventional economic growth. So I would urge him to understand that, without a healthy, thriving, productive, and resilient climate and nature, all his economic dreams are no more than that. It’s not possible to create the kind of prosperity that he wants without putting the natural world at the heart of that endeavor. So that’s how I’d like to restructure him, as it were. And he may find it interesting to listen to the speech given by the relatively new leader of the Green Party, a man called Zack Polanski, who celebrated the 40th anniversary of the New Economics Foundation by giving a speech about economics. And there was a lot in that speech that I think Keir Stammer could benefit from.
3. Your recent book, Love, Anger & Betrayal, was co-authored with 26 young Just Stop Oil activists. After spending a year in their world, what do you think they find more baffling: the science of climate tipping points, or the fact that your generation thought “sustainable capitalism” was actually going to work?
There are many things about the world that baffle them. I mean, it’s a peculiarly difficult world to interpret these days, let’s be honest, as a young person. But what really concerned them most was the refusal of the political and business establishment to understand, to engage with the science of climate change in terms of what it now tells us. Because this is not something being led by a huge number of extreme left or radical people who have no contact with the mainstream world. The science of climate change comes from incredibly authoritative sources: independent scientists, universities, think tanks, bodies like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I mean, it’s a sort of absolute bastion of the environment that this combined scientific contribution is making. So, for young people today, they don’t understand why, in particular, they refuse to engage properly with that science and refuse to understand the implications of it and what it means for the future, and how urgent it is to act today. And I think that was the principal thing I came away with. They just felt that this was immoral, to turn away from the science, and that it would have devastating implications for people all around the world in the second half of this century. So that was the main thing. The bit that made them angry: we do have those solutions to address the climate crisis. If it was impossible to do anything about it, well, you’d sort of say, OK, that’s it, it’s curtains for humankind. But we’ve still got everything that we need in terms of technology, finance, knowledge, insight, political compassion. We’ve still got everything we need to make these solutions work. And that was where their confusion turned into anger, because watching politicians ignore the science and then refuse to act to implement the solutions available to us, that’s a hard reality to live with if you’re in your 20s today.
4. Many young activists are choosing not to have children due to climate despair. As a father and a Baronet, how do you reconcile the traditional concept of “legacy” with a future that many of your co-authors feel has already been foreclosed?
That’s a challenging question. I suppose one of the things that I was most moved by was the responses from my co-authors about how they saw the future in terms of themselves as possible parents, having children of their own, and then, perhaps in that predictable way, going on to become grandparents later on in their lives. And quite a lot of them have already decided that they will not have children because they do not feel comfortable about the prospect of bringing a child into the world as it will be in the future. And that’s a terrible thing for young people to have to come to terms with. Everybody in the world should be able to make a decision about whether or not they wish to have children, in the expectation that that child will then be loved and nurtured, and that the surrounding community and society will help look after parents, children, grandparents, etc. So to take that choice away at this stage is one of the worst forms of intergenerational betrayal that I can imagine.
For me, we have two daughters. They’re in their thirties. I don’t have any grandchildren as yet. I am not too worried about legacy stories, Manish. I hope that the contribution that I’ve been able to make as an environmental and sustainability campaigner, I hope that will be as good a legacy as I was able to create. I feel disappointed that it hasn’t helped to bring about greater change to protect the well-being and security of future generations. I wish that everything we’ve been able to do as this generation had a bigger impact, to be honest, which is why I guess I’m still working away at it, even though I am indeed now 75 and still sticking in there, so that I can make whatever contribution I still need to.
5. The Green Party has recently seen a huge rise in popularity by focusing on social justice and the war in Gaza. Does this mean the party is finally becoming a “grown-up” political force, or is it a sign that they only win votes when they stop talking about the environment?
Yes, you touch a raw nerve there, Manish. It’s not quite true when people say that the Green Party now is more focused on the social and justice issues, geopolitical issues like the war in Iran and the genocide in Gaza. The Green Party has always been a party concerned about environmental sustainability, and I know that because I joined the Green Party in 1974. I joined partly because of concern for the environment, but mostly I joined because of my concern about social justice and human rights. And I was in a lucky position. It was called the Ecology Party back in those days. I wrote the Election Manifesto in 1979. So I know that the party in those days represented two sides of the coin: biophysical sustainability and social justice.
But what is happening now is—you’re right—the emphasis now is very much on the social justice concerns, not just in this country but globally, and thinking through our obligations and responsibilities from a human rights perspective and from a social justice perspective. And I really welcome that. I mean, it has made a huge difference. It’s allowed a lot of people to see that the Green Party stands for a very powerful combined narrative about making the world better for people today, as well as for people tomorrow. But you are right. You’re right to put your finger on it. We have to go on talking about and acting on the climate crisis, on the nature crisis, on the collapse of the natural world, on threats to biodiversity, on accelerating climate impacts. We can’t leave all that behind. We have to do both these things together.
6. Back in the 70s, the Green Party was famous for not wanting “leaders” and making every decision by a slow vote. Now that it’s a professional machine, do you miss those old days of community sharing, or does the climate crisis mean we simply don’t have time for that anymore?
Well, I have to be honest. It was hard work back in the 1970s and the 1980s, when the party did not like anything to do with conventional models of leadership. And it had a much more collegiate, non-hierarchical way of doing things. So, just to give you a little anecdote about this: I was effectively leader of the Green Party for three years at the end of the 1970s. But I wasn’t, because we didn’t have leaders. So my title was Rotating Co-Chair. And what that meant was that I shared the chairmanship, or the chairing of the Green Party, with a couple of other people, and every now and then we’d rotate out of that role to let other people take the role on. So I would never be able to claim that I was leader of the Green Party, but I’m proud to have been its Rotating Co-Chair. And it was frustrating, but that’s the way our world was then.
As soon as we had a different model of leadership, and party members recognized the importance of a leadership structure and holding those leaders to account, the Green Party began to do much, much better. So we’ve been lucky with some wonderful people holding those leadership roles. Many of those listening to this will have heard of Caroline Lucas, the leader of the Green Party for quite some time. And now we have Zack Polanski, who is a very charismatic and forthright leader for the party, and is really reaching out and touching a lot of people with his very direct way of talking, very direct approach to dealing with poverty and abuses of human rights, and with thinking through the implications of what that means from a social justice perspective. So I think it works well now. With our electoral system in this country, I doubt we would have done any better back in the 1970s if we’d had a different model of leadership, but who knows.
7. You’ve spent years helping companies find “sustainable profit.” In 2026, looking at the state of the “plastisphere” and “climateflation,” would you say big business has finally learned its lesson, or have they just become better at hiring sustainability directors?
Yeah. Look, this is a massive structural problem for all of us, and the truth is that we’re living in a phase of neoliberal capitalism, which is inherently destructive and unforgiving of any company that wants to try and do things differently. So I, for instance, spent a lot of my time with Forum for the Future, working with companies like Unilever and others that have a good reputation for sustainability, but even they have found it incredibly difficult to keep those standards alive, to put sustainability right there alongside the obligation to make profits. Very difficult. Even the best companies in the world have found this very difficult.
My response to that is I think we have poorer quality business leadership now than we did ten years ago. I think there are fewer CEOs who understand the nature of the challenge and are prepared to steer their companies in such a way as to meet that challenge. But ultimately, the rules of this particular kind of capitalism are written by governments. It isn’t the businesses that write the rules of extractive, destructive, neoliberal, profit-maximizing capitalism. It’s politicians that write those rules. It’s politicians that determine the scope and the extent of the marketplace and where society needs to be allowed to flourish and breathe differently from the market, with all its obsession with growth and maximizing profits for shareholders.
So, for me, the onus comes back to governments. They have to change the rules of the game, and then businesses will be able, I believe, to respond more intelligently, more purposefully, to making their companies deliver for their shareholders but also deliver for the environment, society, and future generations, which they’re not doing at the moment. Everything else is subordinated to the need to maximize profit in the short term for owners and shareholders today.
8. You were King Charles’s top environment advisor for over 30 years. Now that he is the King (and must stay neutral) and you are an activist (who can say anything), which of you do you think is having a harder time getting the UK government to actually listen?
I don’t, fortunately, have any ambitions any longer to lobby politicians, to persuade them to do things in the way that I once used to do. And I was indeed once chair of the Sustainable Development Commission here in the UK, reporting directly to Tony Blair, who was prime minister at the time, and then to Prime Minister Gordon Brown. And as you say, I also spent 30 years advising Prince Charles, as he was then before he became king. I no longer have any advisory role. So there’s no embarrassment of one of his advisors becoming involved in direct action and getting arrested for protesting about Palestine, and so on. There’s no difficulty about that, because I haven’t been an advisor now for quite a long time.
I suspect he still finds it very frustrating having to deal with a government that doesn’t really want to lead properly on this, that is often forgetful. And that’s very upsetting for all of us who want to see the UK lead the world, join that group of countries that are totally committed to international climate finance, to fairness in the way in which we address the nature crisis, and so on. So I have no insight into this any longer, but I suspect he’s quite frustrated having to deal with politicians who may see things a little bit differently today. I’m not frustrated because I’ve given up on trying to advise politicians in that way a long time ago, and I now just prefer to join my voice to those who are more radically engaged in climate campaigning today.
9. Your 2013 book The World We Made imagined a sustainable 2050. We are now halfway there. If you could send a postcard back to your 2013 self, would it be a “wish you were here” or a “get out while you still can”?
Well, it’s a funny thing. So here we are, The World We Made. I was looking at it this morning, completely coincidentally. I didn’t know you’d be asking me about this. I was looking at it this morning because I wrote the book, as you said, in 2012, trying to work out what a good world would look like in 2050. And one of the things that I projected back in 2012 was that there would be an uprising of young people. I wrote it in such a way that I thought it would happen in 2018, and it would be called the Enough Movement. Enough of this short-sightedness, corruption, greed, lack of concern for the environment, lack of concern for social justice, etc. So I talked about the Enough Movement rising up in 2018 and eventually, in the early 2020s, more or less where we are now, persuading governments to set about the business of protecting the environment and improving people’s well-being in a very different way. Well, that didn’t work. You may have noticed that didn’t work. We did not rise up. We did see a huge youth climate movement emerge in 2018. It was very influential and important for a couple of years. And then, of course, the pandemic came. And the pandemic, COVID-19, meant that a lot of that youth-driven climate campaigning pretty much disappeared at that time.
So, for me, it’s pretty frustrating to see a little progress that we’ve made on some of these things. But then I haven’t completely written off the possibility of young people rising up and forcing older generations to do it differently. I’m sure you are mindful of what’s been happening in Nepal recently, where the Gen Z uprising in September 2025 last year led to the resignation of the then-government of KP Sharma Oli. And I’m looking at the election results now from Nepal, with Balen taking an astonishing majority in the new parliament, demonstrating that Gen Z can still make an enormous difference in the way different countries respond to these crises: corruption, nepotism, unfairness, refusal to acknowledge unemployment for young people, the environment, climate, etc., etc.
And you can look back at the uprising, of course, in Bangladesh, where the regime of Sheikh Hasina was eventually overthrown, at huge cost, mind you—huge loss of life, terrible, terrible loss of life. But I think young people are going to be pretty involved in some of these political earthquakes we see emerge from time to time in the future. And I feel that I didn’t get that completely wrong; I just may have got the timing wrong.
10. You’ve been given some colorful labels over the years, from ‘environmentalist aristocrat’ to ‘the David Owen of the green movement’—which one do you think misses the mark the most?
I’ve always been very clear about this. I had practically nothing—I had literally nothing—to do with how I came into this world. Children don’t choose their parents. They end up with a childhood over which they have very little control or influence. I am amongst the most privileged people in this world. I was born into a loving family with sufficient resources to make for a very privileged education and childhood. And I have always felt, from that point on, I had nothing to do with that. I’m blessed by that privilege. The one thing I can do is to use that privilege now to help create good things in the world, to help make lives better for other people. That’s why I spent ten years as a teacher in a state school here in London. It’s why I’ve been committed to green politics, to human rights, to social justice throughout my life. So I can’t do anything about the way I was born and the privileges that I enjoyed through that. But I feel I have been able to use some of that privilege to join with others—always, always with others—to help create better conditions for other people.
11. You’ve often said that “fear is a bad motivator” for climate action, yet your recent work with Just Stop Oil is fueled by deep alarm. If you had to choose one for the next decade, which is the more powerful tool for change: the optimism of a green tech revolution or the fury of a generation that feels betrayed?
I do take some comfort in the fact that the technology is changing all the time, improving all the time. I look now at the fact that even the EU, with very advanced industrialised economies, gets 30% of its electricity from renewables and is well on the way to being able to source half of its electricity from renewables within the next decade. These technologies are massively important, and they’re important for the rich world and poorer countries. They’re important for those countries such as India and China today, and Indonesia and Brazil, where these renewables will actually help substitute for fossil fuels far faster than anybody once thought possible. I’m very focused at the moment on watching the solar revolution in Pakistan, for instance. It isn’t a revolution that’s talked much about here in the UK, but it’s fascinating, bit by bit. I believe countries like Pakistan and Indonesia and elsewhere in the world will be able to reduce dependence on fossil fuels and will be able to provide energy services with clean, much more reliable, and much more climate-friendly sources of electricity. So I celebrate that. I feel that’s really important.
I’m not stepping away from the fact, though, that politicians are still far too dependent on fossil fuels. There are so many corrupt politicians in the world today. There are so many politicians who take gifts or bribes or incentives from the fossil fuel industry. And the fossil fuel industry is the most wicked, extractive, and destructive industry on the face of the earth. And it still corrupts the whole of the political system all around the world. So I am angry at that. I understand why young people are still angry at that. And if we want to see the full revolution—that renewables plus storage, plus energy efficiency, plus microgrids, the whole alternative package—if we want to see that really thrive and make a difference in the lives of hundreds of millions of people now, in the near future, we still need to be angry about the hold that the fossil fuel industry has on our politicians.
12. After decades of advising the then-Prince of Wales, what is your assessment of King Charles III’s current trajectory? Do you believe his influence on the global environmental stage will expand or diminish now that he has ascended to the throne?
As I mentioned before, I’m no longer involved with King Charles. My role as an advisor ended, in fact, about 10 years ago, so before he became king. And I don’t have any contact with him today, so I can’t really answer that question. The only thing I do know is that his passion for the natural world, for dealing with climate, for doing this on a just and equitable basis around the world—I know that passion will be undimmed by becoming king. That won’t have changed his views at all. But obviously, as king, he has a different way of sharing those with other heads of state, with politicians here in the UK. It’s a very different role than the role he played when he was Prince of Wales. But I have no doubt that he will still be—he’ll still be doing what he can to help make a difference in that respect.
13. If you had the chance to start all over again, would you do things differently, or would you leave everything as it is?
I do feel that the combination of different things that I’ve been able to do—both the radical and political campaigning and the advisory and more establishment positions that I’ve had—has been a real blessing. I mean, I’ve been able to cover the whole spectrum of climate, environment, and human rights campaigning, and that’s been incredibly lucky.
Would I do some things differently? I think I probably should have. I think I should have gotten back into campaigning sooner, before I was about to take up campaigning again, make a rise in managing in the forum, and deal with the pandemic. So I think if I had to do one thing again, I would have gotten back on the campaigning trail at least five years earlier than I managed to do.
14. I’m all out of questions. Is there anything you would like to add?
No, and thank you for your questions. They’re really very insightful and interesting, and I don’t usually get asked questions in that kind of way. But I guess the one thing I would say is that I’ve obviously become completely fascinated by the relationships between generations, and I’m fully persuaded that this whole notion of intergenerational justice—how older generations need to work effectively with younger generations and what we need to do together—is going to become the most important part of this very challenging decade ahead of us. Because if we don’t have that kind of solidarity between generations, then it’s going to be almost impossible to do what we need to do. But if we can build that solidarity, then I think a lot more things will happen that would otherwise not be the case.
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