When Push Comes to Shove
Review of 'Love, Anger and Betrayal: Just Stop Oil’s Young Climate Campaigners' by Jonathon Porritt
In 2009 the New York Times wrote that the Dark Mountain manifesto was ‘ changing the environmental debate in the UK, and the rest of Europe’. That change was met with a storm of derision from mainstream environmentalists, even more so when Uncivilisation’s co-author, Paul Kingsnorth skilfully dismantled their mantra of ‘sustainability’ in his essay ‘Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist’ in our first issue. But others welcomed the reveal – that no amount of polite and well-meaning words about ‘ecosystems’ would alter the course industrial civilisation had taken. In the intervening years, this ineffectiveness has become more apparent, as the ‘polycrisis’ has deepened and any attempt to halt the damage wreaked by the fossil fuel industry (among other drivers) has failed.
Today, writer Anthea Lawson reviews the veteran campaigner Jonathon Porritt’s new book, Love, Anger & Betrayal, co-written with 26 young Just Stop Oil activists (some imprisoned, or awaiting trial for non-violent protest), where he also documents his own seismic shift from moderate negotiator to climate elder, now ‘roaring with radical rage’.
NOT KNOWING ABOUT THE GLASS that covers Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, I remember the visceral shock when I first saw the picture of Anna Holland and fellow Just Stop Oil protester Phoebe Plummer, their left hands glued to the wall of London’s National Gallery as orange Heinz tomato soup dripped down the famous yellow blooms. Holland, a 22-year old poetry student from Newcastle, was the one brandishing an empty can; the second was rolling under the guard rope behind which they – and the soup – were supposed to have remained.
Holland’s involvement in climate action had begun with the 2019 school strikes, after which she worked with Youth Strike for Climate in Manchester and the Youth Climate Justice Coalition until early 2021. She organised marches across Newcastle during 2022 against the bill that became the Policing, Sentencing and Courts Act (an attack on peaceful protest rights in the UK) then discovered Just Stop Oil (JSO) through a talk at university. She was first arrested with JSO in August 2022 for blocking an oil tanker outside Kingsbury Oil depot in Warwickshire. Over the next few weeks a further two arrests followed for blocking roads in London, before that soup day in October, which resulted in a custodial sentence of 20 months. After serving four of them at HMP Send, a women’s prison in Surrey, she was released on an electronic tag. ‘It’s not a real person I attribute my drive to, but a fictional one,’ Holland says. ‘Alba Trueba, from Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, inspired me not just to be revolutionary but to be resilient… She was imprisoned and tortured, but she never lost her purpose. Reading this story at the age of 15 was fundamental to building the person that I am today.’
Whatever you might have thought of JSO’s motorway gantry-climbing, traffic-stopping, paint-chucking tactics, whether before or since they hung up their high-vis tabards in April 2025, Jonathon Porritt wants you to know its young activists better. The veteran environmentalist has spent a year co-creating Love, Anger and Betrayal with 26 of them; his narrative is interspersed with interviews and quotes in which they share their fears, motivations and political analysis. Most of the group have been arrested multiple times; more than half of them have spent time in UK prisons, either on remand or serving custodial sentences, and a few more are still awaiting trial, expecting imprisonment. Some have also been involved in protest against the UK’s arming of Israel against Palestinian civilians. This is the new regime in Britain since protest laws were ratcheted up in 2022: prison for nonviolent protest in support of life and peace, while those who arm violators of human rights or whose decisions will burn the planet can continue with impunity.
The media and political class in the UK demonised everyone involved in JSO; Porritt is offering his name and platform to its youngest protesters to explain themselves. He thinks of it as a form of intergenerational justice, and dedicates the book to them. They come across as tight-knit, supportive of each other, well-educated, largely aware of their privilege, attuned to social justice, able to see the deep connections between the climate crisis and the Israeli government and army’s obliteration of Palestinian life in Gaza, observant of how many of those they met in prison have been repeatedly let down and should not be there either. Prison is ‘degrading and dehumanising’, writes Ella Ward from HMP Styal, a women’s prison outside Manchester, where she is on remand awaiting trial on a charge of public nuisance. ‘Unfortunately for the government, prison is not a deterrent to living in resistance. They don’t understand that refusing to be complicit in allowing the climate crisis to unfold is not a switch we can just turn off.’
‘Refusing to be complicit in allowing the climate crisis to unfold is not a switch we can just turn off.’
Some JSO activists are deeply immersed in nature, others confess that they are not, but that hasn’t got in the way of fighting for it. Martin Luther King and the Freedom Riders, who challenged segregated travel in the Jim Crow south, are shared inspirations, as are the Suffragettes (although not their violence). Roger Hallam, co-founder of JSO, Insulate Britain and Extinction Rebellion – himself currently serving a four-year sentence,, for taking part in a Zoom call to plan a direct action – is invoked a few times; anyone familiar with Hallam’s inspirations and perorations may recognise his influence. Whatever else he achieves here, Porritt has documented, thoughtfully and sympathetically, some of the inside feeling of the Hallamite resistance to murderous fossil fuel hegemony.
He also wants to amplify their vision of a world where the crises are all connected and more of us need to make ourselves uncomfortable to fight for the possibility of life on Earth. The love and anger of the title belong to both the young protesters and their chronicler. They are motivated by love for the world: love for those yet to come and love for those already harmed by climate breakdown. Porritt, in turn, loves their vision and willingness to put it all on the line. ‘Working with this particular group of young “warriors” has been extraordinarily re-energising,’ he writes. The young activists’ anger tends to be directed at those who know what is coming but are not acting as if they know. He is surprised at the muted volume of their rage, however. Porritt’s anger is less controlled than theirs, and a little more specific. He does set out the betrayals of the media, governments, business and the oil industry, especially since the 2019 youth climate strikes in which one and a half million young people across 180 countries mobilised to demand a liveable future. He points, as the young protesters do, to recent trickery like Labour’s failure to cancel the Conservatives’ go-ahead for North Sea oil extraction at Rosebank (found to be unlawful by the Scottish courts, although the threat is not yet over), and Ed Miliband’s decision during 2024 to commit £22 billion to unworkable carbon capture and storage.
He walks us through the extraordinary legal developments since 2022, which have limited the right to protest and even to rely on jurors’ consciences. Yet some of his greatest ire seems reserved not for ministers, judges, or media and oil barons. His mark, often, is ‘mainstream environmentalists’ – who are, perhaps, more likely to be reading this book than those other targets.
‘How is it that these young campaigners seem to find it so much easier – and absolutely necessary – to empathise with future generations than we do?’ he asks. How is it that mainstream environmental organisations aren’t concerned by the terrifying crackdown on protest rights in the UK? He quotes one of his own blogs from last year where he had called out Friends of the Earth, the National Trust, the RSPB and WWF for complacency as the UK turns into a ‘police state’ (although Friends of the Earth did intervene in the January 2025 appeal against the sentences given to 16 JSO activists). How is it that mainstream environmentalists can see the widening gap between climate science and political reality, yet double down on the same failing tactics?
He cites Emmeline Pankhurst and Martin Luther King’s loss of tolerance for mainstream movements; slams WWF’s ‘banal and dishonest half-truths’ in reporting on the staggering loss of 73% of wildlife between 1970 and 2020 without adequately pointing the finger at capitalism; takes sub-tweetish swipes at ‘stubborn optimists’ and those claiming a ‘moderate flank’ is going to swing it when moderate approaches haven’t worked for the past 50 years. He acknowledges, looking at some of the academic research on divisive protest, that he doesn’t know if JSO’s confrontational tactics have yet been any more effective than consensus approaches, then points out the limit to arguments based on ‘theories of change’ in such a complex world. As so many others have learned over the ages, sometimes you have to act based on morality, on a virtue ethic that it’s the right thing to do, rather than because you ‘know’ what the outcome might be.
So while Love, Anger and Betrayal is about the young activists, it is also about Jonathon Porritt. One reason is because, as he notes early on, this project is ‘not remotely objective’; he was a supporter of JSO from the start. Fair enough: he doesn’t pretend otherwise, nor try to excise his editorialising from the narrative. Another, more interesting reason why this book is about Porritt, however, is because for decades and to most observers, he was perhaps the quintessential example of the kind of ‘mainstream environmentalist’ he now decries. Co-chair of the Green Party and Director of Friends of the Earth in the 1980s; co-founder, in the 90s, of Forum for the Future, which worked with businesses on sustainability; sustainability adviser, in the noughties, to Blair and Brown’s New Labour governments.
On his way out of the latter post in 2009, he was telling The Guardian that ‘the business community is largely aboard’. Exiting Forum for the Future in May 2023 after three decades at the helm, he excoriated government inaction but was still hymning ‘the incredible potential of business and civil society joining forces’. Alright, it was a press release and a founder might be expected to be positive on departure, even if their views have begun to shift. But still: Porritt was arguably a poster boy for ‘nice’ environmentalism and business-friendly ‘sustainability’ during three or more decades in which – as he’s now quite clear – humanity lost its chance for a graded retreat from its fossil-fuel-powered addiction to capitalist growth and extraction. Now we’re looking into the abyss and, in his mid-70s, he’s roaring with radical rage.
I welcome this shift, and would have loved him to go further and be more explicit about it in his text. And I say this because it takes one to know one. I wasn’t ever under much illusion that the biggest profit-making corporations would voluntarily act in the common interest, but it took me a long time to see the limitations of the policy-influencing I had been doing, or to discern the origins of the information-provision and elite-access mindset that underpins this approach and the funded organisations that pursue it – even as their incremental gains are overtaken by colossal forces of the techno-libertarian-authoritarian variety, let alone those of implacable earth-systems. It’s a classic campaigner move, however, to rant from our current position and not to acknowledge exactly how we came by it. By all means, let’s have the rant. Dark Mountain readers will no doubt be familiar with these arguments, but more widely, they are needed. Porritt is right that any environmentalism that doesn’t talk about capitalism and its deathly need to relentlessly grow and extract is unworthy of the name.
Any environmentalism that doesn’t talk about capitalism and its deathly need to relentlessly grow and extract is unworthy of the name.
But let’s not pull up the ladder that got us to our views, especially when we so want others to join us. Porritt does, at points, include himself in his critique. It’s often implicit, however, and would be easy to miss; his former status and positions can feel like a ghost in the story. Sometimes the ‘mainstream environmentalists’ in his crosshairs are a ‘we’ rather than a ‘they’. He admits at one point that it was naive of Forum for Future to think it could change BP and Shell’s direction, and at another that he failed to stir even a minority of citizens. He acknowledges, albeit without quite saying ‘I know this from experience’, that it is hard for NGOs to ‘adapt’ to the fact that the global economy is the direct successor of colonial economies of extraction, or ‘that the system depends on maintaining abhorrent levels of inequality, and that the super-rich have been allowed to become a law unto themselves.’
Well indeed: NGOs are often funded directly or indirectly by this system. When he invokes moments at which he had a ringside seat, like the 1987 Brundtland report which introduced the concept of ‘sustainable development’, and that era’s mutual incomprehension between ‘greenies’ and aid workers, it sounds like he might go there, into his own back story; he notes that Friends of the Earth was, at that stage, very forward-looking… but then the narrative strides off on the more direct path of out-there politics rather than venturing down the brambly route of reflecting on his own changing politics.
Yet I wonder if the story might have been even more powerful had he taken the opportunity to say more. If there’s really no longer anything to lose, why not go the whole hog and show, in public and as a public service, how we have got to where we are? He notes briefly that it was becoming clear to him by 2016 that the efforts of NGOs, diplomacy and ‘engaged businesses’ were running out of steam; the arrival of Extinction Rebellion on the scene in 2018 was (as it felt for many of us) a relief. And I know that the purpose of the book – successfully realised – is to elevate the young JSO campaigners. But I found myself wanting to know more about how he feels, now, about what he was doing during those years at Forum for the Future or working for Blair and Brown. What were the steps for Porritt, personally, to move from mainstream to radical? How much have the views he expresses here been influenced by spending a year hanging out with the JSO crew and visiting them in prison? Or – perhaps it’s an ‘and’ – did he want to hang out with them because something was already growing in him? What else was going on? I wondered if such disclosures might encourage other wavering mainstreamers to follow his path, rather than feel that they must dig in to defend themselves from the blast of criticism.
Love, Anger & Betrayal is published by Mount House Press (£9.99)
Anthea Lawson is an author, campaigner and Dark Mountain editor. Her latest book, How Not to Save the World, will be published by Oneworld in 2026.
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Great review esp the inquiry on JPs own journey. I am more interested however and looking forward to learning more about the younger generations motivations struggles hopes and reality dimensions as they are the owners of the future.
I am in my mid seventies to and feel no one has ever convinced the mindless monster of wealth creation to STOP .It has so many tentacles that press oh so insidiously everywhere and ignores as silly all attempts to alert us to the reality of the planets distress .