The Hon. Sir Jonathon Espie Porritt, CBE, (born 6 July 1950) is an English environmentalist and writer. Porritt appears frequently in the media, writing in magazines, newspapers and books, and appearing on radio and television regularly.
He was born in London, and educated at Eton College and Magdalen College, Oxford. Despite training as a barrister, he decided to become an English teacher at St Clement Danes Grammar School (later Burlington Danes School) in Shepherd's Bush, West London in 1974.
Porritt is the son of Lord Porritt, 11th Governor-General of New Zealand. His father, an Allied general in Jonathon Porritt, 2nd Baronet, but has so far declined to do so.He has two daughters.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, Porritt was a prominent member of the Ecology Party. As chair of the UK Ecology Party (now the Green Party) from 1978 to 1984, he presided over changes that made the party much more prominent in elections. Under his stewardship, membership grew from a few hundred to around 3,000.
In 1984 his first book, Seeing Green, was published. In this year he also gave up teaching to become Director of Friends of the Earth in Britain, a post he held until 1990. From 1993-1996 he chaired Stakeholder Forum for a Sustainable Future then known as UNEP-UK.
After the Greens achieved 15% of the European Parliamentary vote in 1989, he became a strong public advocate of change in the Green Party. In particular, he advocated a more professional organisation with identifiable leaders.
He also backed the election of Cynog Dafis, the joint Plaid Cymru-Green MP for Ceredigion.
With Sara Parkin and Paul Ekins he founded Forum for the Future in 1996, a sustainable development charity. In 1997 he was appointed the inaugural Chair of the incoming Labour government's Sustainable Development Commission from which he retired in September 2009.
He has also supported the Forests Now Declaration, which calls for new market based mechanisms to protect tropical forests.
In February 2009, Porritt stated that population growth is a serious threat to the global environment and that contraception, abortion and family planning is a part of the answer to global warming. He thinks that people should have no more than two children and if they do, they are being irresponsible. He has been heavily criticised for what some are calling anti-family and communist-like comments.
From the time at which he founded Forum of the Future, Porritt withdrew from party politics to concentrate on his non party political roles. In March 2009 Porritt spoke at the launch of the South West Green Party European Election campaign in Bristol, he stated that he had always remained a member of the Green Party and that now was the correct time to reaffirm his support.
Since leaving the SDC, Porritt has publicly supported the report Prosperity Without Growth.
It remains to be seen whether he will now return to party political activism after retiring from the SDC.
Porritt acts as advisor to many bodies on environmental matters, as well as to individuals including Prince Charles and Stuart Rose, the chief executive of Marks & Spencer, advising on that company's forward strategy. He is a board member of Wessex Water.
Porritt is on the advisory board of BBC Wildlife magazine and actively supports the efforts of experts promoting renewable energy and sustainable development such as Walt Patterson. From 2000 - 2009 he was chair of the Sustainable Development Commission, set up by the UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. He has however been critical of the Labour government for its environmental record and its pro-nuclear stance. He is a patron of the Optimum Population Trust. A substantial re-write of his bestselling book As if the World Matters was published by Earthscan in September 2007. In July 2008 he became an honorary graduate of the University of Exeter.
“I am unapologetic about asking people to connect up their own responsibility for their total environmental footprint and how they decide to procreate and how many children they think are appropriate,”
“I think we will work our way towards a position that says that having more than two children is irresponsible. It is the ghost at the table. We have all these big issues that everybody is looking at and then you don’t really hear anyone say the ‘p’ word.”
"The trust (OPT) will release research suggesting UK population must be cut to 30m if the country wants to feed itself sustainably."
"I've learned that the fate of the world's indigenous people lies in the fate of us all. And the reason is very simple. At the heart of today's so-called environmental crisis' is something profound and disturbing. We are simply not at one with the world in which we live, we are not 'true dwellers in the land', and behave for the most part as if we were just uncaring itinerants hanging around until we've used everything up and then moving on."
