You Ask The Questions: Sir Jonathon Porritt

Judging by your early writing, you used to be a real green radical. Have your beliefs mellowed over the years?

I wrote Seeing Green in 1984, before the collapse of Communism, so my political criticism in those days was even-handed


If we don’t change our ways, what will happen to the planet?

It depends how you interpret the threat of “irreversible climate change”. If the planet just kept on getting hotter and hotter, then not only would we become extinct, but so would the vast majority of life forms. Would life on Earth eventually be restored? The evidence from previous “extinction spasms” indicates it probably would, over hundreds of millions of years, with as great if not greater a level of species diversity.

In that case, it’s not so much the planet we should be worrying about, in the long run, as ourselves. Indeed, there has always been a particular school of green thinking which argues that the best thing we could do for the planet would be to accelerate our own demise