Love, Anger & Betrayal – Book Review
Love, Anger & Betrayal: Just Stop Oil’s Young Climate Campaigners, Jonathon Porritt. Mount House Press, July 2025. ISBN: 978-191-294-5542, 288 pages. RRP £9.99
Judith Russenberger’s review of a new book written by our patron, Jonathon Porritt.
Jonathon Porritt’s imperative in writing this book is to highlight and acknowledge the failure of inter generational justice. What is intergenerational justice – or rather injustice? It is when one generation overuses or abuses its share of the Earth’s resources such that future generations are negatively impacted. Porritt explore this topic on the one hand by reflecting on his own career and experiences as a long term environmental campaigner, and on the other, by interviewing and learning from a younger generation, vis Just Stop Oil activists. Their quotes bring the book to life!
Porritt is clear that our intergenerational justice is way out of balance. The excessive consumption of carbon emitting products by the current and past generations is causing rapid climate change that is creating an increasingly hostile environment for future generations. Where we are at the moment is bad enough, but where we are heading is catastrophic. (I have included his compact listing of the facts in the appendix below).
Why, Porritt asks, when all the scientific evidence is so clear, do so few people take the climate crisis seriously?
Porritt clearly feels that governments, NGOs, environmentalists, the media, and the moderate flank, have been complicit in not making the severity and the urgency of the crisis crystal clear – and he does not exclude himself from this criticism. Instead he observes that it has been people like those in Just Stop Oil who have absorbed the facts, joined the dots, and taken action – and doing so not just for themselves but for future generations too.
Ella Ward, JSO: “It all comes down to what people see as a responsible or sane response to what is happening in the world. For me, what we’re doing with Just Stop Oil is the most logical, sane thing to be doing. What is completely insane is pretending that we can keep on living normally, with our crazy, consumption-driven lifestyles, even as the climate scientists keep on telling us that we’re crashing through one threshold after another.” (1)
Porritt then questions why it is that JSO activists are the ones being made to feel the full weight of the law, and not governments, business leaders, etc for their failure to act. He quotes from Antonio Guterres, UN General Secretary: “Climate activists are sometimes depicted as dangerous radicals. But the truly dangerous radicals are the countries that are increasing the production of fossil fuels. Investing in new fossil fuel infrastructure is moral and economic madness.” (2)
What Porritt discovers in interviewing members of JSO is not anger or resentment or bitterness, but rather a powerful example of a lived community experience that has all the echoes of the first Christian communities. (Whilst the emotion from the book’s title of love and betrayal come from the JSO members, it is the anger that comes from Porritt.)
Phoebe Plummer, JSO: “And there’s something here that people don’t see – they focus on the actions but miss the degree to which the community of Just Stop Oil makes all that possible. I’m able to be here in prison because I have faith that I will be held by this beautiful community we’ve created, and that when I come out of prison, with no money, limited job prospects and a prison record – I’m not scared about that, because I know I will be held through these times.” (3)
Eddie Whittingham, JSO: “It’s our values that tell us what is or isn’t important about how we should lead our lives, and what kind of change we should be seeking. All social movements need a good strategy, of course, but they also need a vision; without that sense of shared identity and shared purpose it’s difficult to work effectively together. This is what people refer to as “the ethical basis of civil resistance”, and I’ve always felt that there is a spiritual dimension to this …
“But there’s just so much wrong with what we refer to as “Western civilisation“, with its endless focus on growth and consumption, and little recognition of people’s deeper feelings – what it means to be human, to lead simpler, genuinely fulfilled lives at this point in history. We have to get so much better about asking the spiritual questions, inviting people to think more deeply about the spiritual aspects of our lives – and that has always been absolutely critical for me.” (4)
I found this comment by Eddie particularly striking as I think it questions whether we, as Christians or as the Church, have failed in our gospel calling.
The fact is that none of us have been ‘good ancestors’! However, Porritt believes that there is still time to redeem ourselves, to restore the intergenerational balance and to act together to reduce the impact of the climate crisis and replace our flawed profit-focused capitalist system with one that is fair and caring and protects the well-being of future generations.
Sean Irving, JSO: “It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the scale of the change that is needed, and for me that means focusing on places where we can make a real difference… My PhD is focused on changing economics for the better, so that people can provide their needs without the endless focus on more consumption, more growth, more waste…but my main solution is to make all that stuff work in practice. How do we build social and emotional resilience, creating better spaces and communities, to substitute for so much of the pseudo-satisfactions of consumerism practice?” (5)
Jonathon Porritt: “I know that some will regard this as being almost self-indulgently naïve, but the young people whose views you have been connecting with, chapter after chapter, really do believe that if people could just ‘see’ what they see, could just ‘step into the shoes’ of people in the second half of this century in the way they do, and could be helped to understand that we still have time to avoid the worst consequences of climate breakdown, then they’d be out there forcing our elected representatives to get a grip on the Climate Emergency in the same way as they did, more or less, on the Covid pandemic.
“Not by everyone gluing themselves to motorway slip roads, or disrupting sporting events, or hurling soup at the screens protecting treasured artistic icons, but by exercising their rights not just to vote every now and then, but to speak out, to protest, to shame all those blocking this necessary revolution, and to organise, street by street, house by house.” (6)
“[The] situation could still, even now, be transformed if citizens were able to share the truth about them – the oligarchs, the billionaires, the warmongers, the destroyers of hopes and dreams; the truth about the sheer impossibility of relying on economic growth, stretching indefinitely into the future, to improve the condition of humankind; the truth about our total dependence on the natural world to provide both for our material prosperity and for our wellbeing; the truth about all the inspiring economic and political alternatives that would allow fair, dynamic and sustainable communities to thrive the world over; and the truth, most importantly about who we humans really are, a species with a much greater capacity for compassion, empathy, mutual respect, and for co-creating a better world for ourselves with all non-human life, than any assiduously cultivated tropes about ‘innate’ selfishness, greed, competitiveness and devil-take-the-hindmost materialism would have us believe.” (7)
Porritt adds this quote from Antonio Guterres: “We have a choice. Collective action or collective suicide. It is in our hands.” (8)
That is your choice and mine. What will you do?
And yes, do read the book!
- p262
- p107
- p260
- p268
- p276
- p261
- p270
- p270
Appendix
The situation at the end of 2024:
- The average temperature was 1.6C above pre-industrial levels, being both the hottest year on record so far but also the first to break the 1.5C threshold
- The majority of scientists now believe chances of staying below that 1.5C is now ‘deader than a doornail’
- The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere increased by 3.58 parts per million to 427 ppm, the biggest annual leap since records began
- Wildfires worsened and at the same time emissions from coal, oil and gas increased
- Both the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets lost record volumes while average ocean surface temperatures broke all records (p28)
Likely consequence of a 2C temperatures increase:
- Economic contraction – GDP loss of over 25%
- Mass human mortality events leading to over 2 billion deaths
- Triggering of a high number of climate tipping points escalating further temperature rises
- Breakdown of critical ecosystem services and earth services
- Major extinction events in multiple geographic areas
- Ocean circulation massively impacted
- Severe social-political fragmentation in many regions
- Loss of low lying areas from rising sea levels
- Mass migration of millions driven by heat and water stress
- Catastrophic mortality events from disease, malnutrition, thirst and conflict (p43)
Judith Russenberger
Since early childhood Judith’s life has been shaped by her Christian faith and its related love for the environment we share with all our brethren human and non human. Her aim is to walk the talk where possible. She lives in southwest London where she have a semi wild garden full of fruit trees. As well as being a Green Christian she is also a Franciscan tertiary and part of Christian Climate Action. She writes a blog greentau.org
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