What good is persuasion if no one is paying attention? Why Just Stop Oil's resolute young campaigners chose civil disobedience.
The climate crisis deepens with terrifying predictability. Meanwhile, many of the young campaigners who seek to wake us up to the truth of this, through peaceful direct action, are silenced and stuck in prison.
They do not see themselves as brave heroes, nor as dangerous extremists; they do care about science and the role it should play in government policy. As their personal profiles in the book reveal, their civil disobedience is driven by desperation, but motivated primarily by love - for those who have already felt the impact of a radically changing climate and for those whose lives will be blighted in the future, often in countries which have done least to cause the crisis.
Misrepresented and often reviled in the media, Just Stop Oil and other 'Radical Flank' environmental campaigners will be deservedly recognised in future, just as the Suffragettes have been, for the crucially important role they continue to play in the climate movement. Theirs is a generation systematically betrayed by politicians. And by all of us who allow this to continue, on our watch, year after year.
Six years on from the biggest climate protest in history in 2019, led by Greta Thunberg, young people remain largely shut out of ever more dysfunctional political processes, able only to beg for the scraps of a 'just transition' that would at best mitigate the coming devastation, much of which is now unavoidable.
Just Stop Oil stopped active campaigning in March 2025. But for most of its remarkable young activists, the work of civil resistance goes on. They continue to shoulder the burden of attempting to secure change in a world locked into a deeply damaging status quo.
Jonathon Porritt spent a year working with twenty-six Just Stop Oil campaigners to co-create Love, Anger & Betrayal, driven by a fierce commitment to Intergenerational Justice. The campaigners feel part of the interlinked chain of humanity, empathising more powerfully with future generations than so many of us, even when many of them may well decide never to have children of their own.
