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P - Jonathon Porrit

I Could I ask you please, how did your interest in the environment, and the need to protect it, begin?

P It really all began because I was a teacher, and teaching  in an inner London comprehensive school near Shepherd’s Bush, and obviously a lot of the work we were doing were ... was making assumptions about the shape of the future, and the world into which those children would have to go out, after they’d finished their five years’ schooling. And I became more and more involved in trying to think what the shape of the planet would be like after the year two thousand, and one of the big projects that we did with some of our kids was to look more carefully at the relationship between humankind and the planet. And that got me interested in the whole subject, and I started reading much more about ecology. And then I began to realize that you can’t really talk about ecology as a science, you have to consider ecology within a social and political context. And that’s what drew me into Green politics. I became increasingly involved in several organizations, tried to wrap my... mind more and more around the economics of the issues, as that’s really the key to it all, and eventually ended up with “Friends of the Earth”, as...as director.

I I see. When you look into the future, the next thirty years, a reasonably  long term, you perhaps see reasons to be both optimistic and pessimistic. What changes and developments do you think we might see over the next thirty years?

P It is very hard to predict - it has to be said - and I do feel a strange mixture of pessimism and optimism. I call myself a constructive pessimist, looking at some of the issues we face, and yet if we don’t  face them in a constructive way, then that pessimism merely feeds on itself, and becomes fatalism, and the world really will get into a very sorry state. But obviously, the crucial problems we face now are largely those of population, which is a problem... which is unfolding remorselessly, and will really hit us in the middle of the next century; the misuse or abuse of the world’s resources, such as the clean air, clean water, and the non-renewable resources, the speed with which we’re using up oil, gas, whatever else it may be; the appalling problems of poverty and famine and hunger, which er... what we saw last year in Ethiopia and Sudan, I’m sorry to say, is merely a very small indication of the kind of things we’re going to see before now and the turn of the century; the arms build-up, which has reached really staggeringly immoral levels er... one thousand million million dollars now being spent on arms every year, instead of being spent on the kinds of things that it ought to go on. And all of those problems, to us, which we, which we consider to be the problems of er... the misuse of the planet are very daunting. And they’re not separate, they are all interconnected. And what I think is only just dawning on people, is that a lot of these problems do have the same roots, namely the unsustainable system that we insist upon at the moment, believing that the only way we can increase human wealth is by producing more and consuming more, even if we destroy the planet in the process. On the other side of the coin personally I think that there’s another way out, the alternative we’re putting across to materialism - an increasing awareness of the spiritual values.

I Mr Porrit, thank you very much indeed.

P Thanks.

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