Love, Anger & Betrayal – Book Review
Love, Anger & Betrayal: Just Stop Oil’s Young Climate Campaigners, by Jonathon Porritt, July 2025. Mount House Press, ISBN: 9781912945542, 288 pages. RRP £9.99
Jonathon Porritt’s imperative in writing this book is to highlight and acknowledge the failure of intergenerational justice. Intergenerational injustice arises when one generation overuses or abuses its share of the Earth’s resources such that future generations are negatively impacted. Porritt explore this topic both by reflecting on his own career and experiences as a long term environmental campaigner, and by interviewing and learning from a younger generation, Just Stop Oil activists.
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 creates an increasingly hostile environment for future generations. Where we are at the moment is bad enough, but where we are heading is catastrophic. Why, he 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 and the media 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, doing so not just for themselves but for future generations too. He questions why JSO activists are the ones being made to feel the full weight of the law, and not governments and business leaders 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.”
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 echoes the first Christian communities. Whilst the love and betrayal of the title come from the JSO members, the anger is Porritt’s own. The book is filled with challenging, wise and incisive observations from the young JSO activists themselves, some of which I have quoted in my longer review on the Green Christian website. They include a reflection from Eddie Whittingham that we experience “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”.
I think this 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. In another quotation from Antonio Guterres: “We have a choice. Collective action or collective suicide. It is in our hands.”
Judith Russenberger
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