Jonathon Porritt.

Few figures have shaped Britain’s environmental movement so profoundly, or for so long, as Jonathon Porritt.

After a first in modern languages at Magdalen College, Oxford, Jonathon began training as a lawyer, then abandoned it to teach English in a deprived inner-city area of London. For a decade he led a double life: schoolteacher by day, and by night one of the driving forces behind the fledgling Ecology Party – the organisation that would become the Green Party of England and Wales. Under his chairmanship, membership grew from a few hundred to many thousands, and he twice stood for Parliament at a time when green politics was still widely dismissed as eccentric.

His first book, Seeing Green (1984), became the defining text of ecological politics – hailed as the best insider’s guide to the subject, and the book that famously recruited a young Caroline Lucas, later the Greens’ first MP, to the cause. That same year he became Director of Friends of the Earth, and over six years transformed it from a fringe pressure group of 12,700 members into a national force more than 220,000 strong. Ideas he championed in the 1970s – such as renewable energy, sustainable economics, the folly of growth at all costs – were initially derided yet today are widely accepted and many have become integral to official government policy.

What sets Jonathon apart is that he then took the argument inside the citadel. In 1996, he co-founded Forum for the Future, which became one of the world’s leading sustainability organisations, advising multinationals from Unilever to Marks & Spencer. He also co-founded the Prince of Wales’s Business and Sustainability Programme, and served for decades as an environmental adviser to the man who is now King Charles III. From 2000 to 2009 he was the inaugural Chair of the UK Sustainable Development Commission, reporting directly to the Prime Minister – and proving cheerfully unafraid to bite the hand that appointed him when necessary. He was awarded a CBE in 2000 for services to environmental protection, served ten years as Chancellor of Keele University, and holds honorary degrees from more than twenty universities.

He is also a natural communicator: the author of eleven books and a seasoned broadcaster with decades of radio and television experience. Capitalism As If the World Matters (2005) became a bestseller by daring to argue that business could be part of the solution. The World We Made (Phaidon, 2013) imagined, with rare optimism, a sustainable world in 2050. Hope in Hell (Simon & Schuster, 2020) confronted the Climate Emergency head-on. His latest, Love, Anger & Betrayal (2025), was co-created with twenty-six of Just Stop Oil’s young campaigners, and marks the theme that now animates all his work: intergenerational justice, and what the older generation owes young people inheriting the crisis.

Having stepped down from Forum for the Future in 2023, Jonathon has returned to his campaigning roots – as President of The Conservation Volunteers and Population Matters, and as a tireless voice for the generation coming up behind him. After half a century at the heart of the green movement, his urgency is undimmed: “I cannot recall such a dangerous time as this,” he says – and he is meeting the moment as he always has: on the front foot, ready for the next fight.