Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Desert Island Discs
Presented by Sue Lawley
Environmentalist and director of Friends of the Earth, a leading figure in Britain's influential green lobby.
Eight records
The keepsakes
The book
Charles Dickens
I find Dickens totally absorbing, and I could disappear into his world whenever my world began to get rather boring.
The luxury
I would like to take a fountain pen ... which would not be functional, because I'd just be writing nice things and reflecting on the meaning of life.
In conversation
Presenter asks
Are you forever exasperated by the image of environmentalists as bearded, sandal-wearing lentil-eaters?
I am a bit. It doesn't happen quite so much as it used to do, and I think, to be honest, most people now accept that environmentalists are normal human beings who have a range of human attributes that are not particularly eccentric, and I'm happy to say that those bad old days where it was so easy to stereotype us as weird and wacky have really passed away.
Presenter asks
When did you first fall in love with the earth? How far back does it go?
It goes quite a long way back, really. I was very lucky when I was um growing up because we lived near Hampstead Heath and uh my parents basically allowed us three children, immense freedom to sort of roam over Hampstead Heath. And I think even then, although it didn't sort of look like it in those days, but even then I was in i immensely attracted by the business of being close to the earth, as it were, and just being out and having the usual kind of adventures that kids have at that age. … I've always believed that each of us has a potential relationship with the earth that is latent in in every single person, whether we live in cities or whether we have one educational background or another. … I was able to to think much more intimately and affectionately about the earth from a very early age.
The recording
Timestamps play the recording from that turn
Speaker 1
Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
Speaker 1
The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen eighty nine.
Speaker 1
And the presenter was Sue Lawley.
Presenter
My castaway this week is an environmentalist. Since the nineteen seventies he's been telling us that the world is threatened by the carelessness of man, a message which until recently seemed to fall on rather deaf ears. Today, however, he finds himself at the centre of an increasingly popular movement. The old Etonian who learned to love the world while he was a schoolteacher in London has become, at thirty eight, one of the leaders of Britain's influential green lobby. He is the director of Friends of the Earth, Jonathan Porritt.
Presenter
And he does not have a beard, wear sandals, or eat lentils, Jonathan. Are you forever exasperated by the image?
Jonathon Porritt
I am a bit. It doesn't happen quite so much as it used to do, and I think, to be honest, most people now accept that environmentalists are normal human beings who have a range of human attributes that are not particularly eccentric, and I'm happy to say that those bad old days where it was so easy to stereotype us as weird and wacky have really passed away.
Presenter
And you don't even have to live in the country, do you?
Jonathon Porritt
Indeed not. You don't have to live in the country, and there are a lot of good urban ecologists. It's not quite so easy to be a green living in London or a city as it is living in the country. But it's still important that people do see themselves environmentalists, even if they live in cities.
Presenter
But you don't even have a garden, do you?
Jonathon Porritt
No, no, just a balcony, um, where we grow a few flowers and herbs and
Presenter
Yeah.
Jonathon Porritt
Uh
Presenter
Uh
Jonathon Porritt
More or less a sort of rendering of the natural world, in a small way, but look forward to the possibility of gardens eventually.
Presenter
Or
Presenter
But you don't, as I understand it, even have green fingers.
Jonathon Porritt
No, this is true. I'm ashamed about this really, but I'm I'm pretty well deaf to any
Jonathon Porritt
Plants or flowers that I'm left in charge of, and it's been a source of embarrassment for some time.
Presenter
So will Britton's best known green fade away on our desert island'cause he can't grow anything to eat?
Jonathon Porritt
The likelihood is that I'd be in dire trouble very quickly, because although I'm quite good at suggesting that other people should
Jonathon Porritt
be more self reliant and get stuck into the world of practical ecology. It just so happens that I'm not very well oriented to it myself, and changing a plug is about the limit of my technological expertise.
Presenter
Well, there are no plugs, there's just a wind up gramophone. Is is is the music you'll be able to play on it going to be of any help at all?
Jonathon Porritt
Bing.
Jonathon Porritt
Oh yes, it would be. There's no doubt about that. Although I must say that music is not a crucially important part of my life, but it's a very important part of the background to my life, actually, and it plays an important role in in terms of helping me to work.
Jonathon Porritt
And creating moods so that I can get on and do things, or change my mood, or forget the hassles of the day, or whatever it might be.
Presenter
What's the first piece you'd like?
Jonathon Porritt
The first piece is the opening of Vojak's symphony. I've picked this really because it's the first piece of music that I came to terms with when I was very young, had just gone to school, didn't really know much about music, and there was a wonderful man there who whose sole intent in life was actually to encourage young people to think about music and to and to get involved in it. And really the New World Symphony at that stage was the first thing I'd ever heard, and it was very inspiring.
Presenter
The opening of Vorjak Symphony No. nine, the New World Symphony, played by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir George Schulte.
Presenter
When, Jonathan, did you first fall in love with the earth? How far back does it go?
Jonathon Porritt
It goes quite a long way back, really. I was very lucky when I was um growing up because we lived near Hampstead Heath and uh my parents basically allowed
Jonathon Porritt
us three children, immense freedom to sort of roam over Hampstead Heath. And I think even then, although it didn't sort of look like it in those days, but even then I was in i immensely attracted by the business of being close to the earth, as it were, and just being out and having the usual kind of adventures that kids have at that age.
Presenter
But it it just seems an odd background, really. Born in Hampstead and then Eton and Oxford, it doesn't sound like the likely background for a man of the earth.
Jonathon Porritt
No, it doesn't really, does it? I I'm not quite sure how it all came together. But I think that I've always believed that uh
Jonathon Porritt
Each of us has a potential relationship with the earth that is latent in in every single person, whether we live in cities or whether we have one educational background or another. And that m a lot of the time our sort of industrial society stamps on that relationship. It turns us into technologically minded people rather than earth minded people.
Jonathon Porritt
And sometimes I think you can escape that, and I guess that I was just I see it as being lucky, not everybody would, but I see it as being lucky, in that uh I was able to to think much more intimately and affectionately about the earth from a very early age.
Presenter
And you came very, very close to it, didn't you, uh in your teens when you went to New Zealand?
Jonathon Porritt
Yes, that was particularly special and really lucky that uh
Jonathon Porritt
Um my father went out to New Zealand as Governor General, and uh we lot spent some quite a lot of time over there. And um for different reasons, partly because I I suppose I was going through uh the usual adolescent time then and wasn't necessarily enjoying life completely, my mother thought the best thing to do would be to
Jonathon Porritt
pack me off and get me planting trees, you know, get rid of all that excess energy. I was about eighteen at the time. And that's what I did actually for three years in a row in the middle of the New Zealand winter.
Jonathon Porritt
I planted trees on this bit of scrub land in the north of um the North Island.
Jonathon Porritt
And it is to me the closest that I've ever got to interpreting that relationship with the earth in a completely non intellectual way, i. e. just an ordinary living
Jonathon Porritt
um relationship, which is very hard to do when you're sunk in the middle of London and surrounded by concrete and tarmac and vehicle exhausts and all the rest of the wretched uh delights of so called civ civilization.
Presenter
Shall we have another record?
Jonathon Porritt
Yes, the next record I've chosen really is very much to do with my father, who is an amazing man, and has been a tremendous source of strength to me in life. I mean, I learnt from a very early age that it was okay to be
Jonathon Porritt
idealistic and occasionally unworldly, and to pursue dreams even if they seem to be taking you in odd directions. And I learnt that really from my father. And one of the things that he did when he was young he was to take up athletics, and he was a very successful athlete and won a bronze medal in the nineteen twenty four Olympic Games.
Jonathon Porritt
And so when the uh film Chariots of Fire was made.
Jonathon Porritt
He sort of features in that, not under his own name, because he was approached by the filmmakers at the time and he was so sort of modest at that stage that he didn't really want his name to appear in the film, which I think is a very uh touching indication of the way my father works, and that's why I've chosen the theme music from this film.
Presenter
The theme music from Chariots of Fire, composed and performed by Van Geddes. Let's just go back to your school days to Eton for a moment, where you were by all accounts a great success. What kind of boy were you? Can you describe yourself then?
Jonathon Porritt
Remarkably uncomplicated. Just life seemed to be incredibly easy. I enjoyed um working and I was very involved in in sports of every description and every minute of the day seemed to be full. And it's actually almost impossible now to imagine that life was just an uncomplicated flow of enjoyable experiences, which is what it was.
Presenter
Did you have any idea, then, of what you wanted to do with your life? Your father was a surgeon, wasn't he? Did you think you'd go into medicine?
Jonathon Porritt
Yeah.
Jonathon Porritt
No, I knew even then that I wouldn't go into medicine. I used to detest the smell of hospitals. And one of the uh regular duties that we had to do as as dutiful children was to drag round St. Mary's at Christmastime while Dad carved this great groaning turkey. And uh we used to disappear into the bowels of St Mary's, which is a pretty amazing exploration, I can tell you. But the smell of hospitals appalled me, and I think even then that I decided that medicine was not for me. And actually I was so
Jonathon Porritt
unthinking about the world in those days that I didn't have a clue what I was going to do, not a single idea, and so drifted through in terms of career development in a very unfocused way and ended up doing modern languages not for any particular burning desire to be a linguist, but just because I seemed to be relatively good at them and that was okay and it wasn't very difficult and so that was what I ended up doing.
Presenter
But it's all very establishment stuff, the background, isn't it? I mean, you had no inkling then that there was something of a a radical lurking within.
Jonathon Porritt
No, absolutely not. And I think uh my friends would probably bear that out. Even later on when I was at Oxford I was I was um totally uninterested in politics, to be honest.
Presenter
And you didn't much care for the sort of society that Oxford offered, did you?
Jonathon Porritt
No, I suppose that when I went to Oxford I began to notice much more about the way in which society worked.
Jonathon Porritt
and in a slightly
Jonathon Porritt
Pious way that can't have been terribly pleasant to have shared with anybody. I began to worry about why people didn't make more of the privileges they seemed to have, and why such appalling social and intellectual snobbery was so much part of an Oxford education. And those things really got to me at that time, probably far more than they should have done, with the result that I became really quite deeply antisocial.
Jonathon Porritt
as rapidly as possible, actually moved out of the town of Oxford to a a small cottage in a village near near Oxford, where I had an again a very pleasant time by virtue of not having to come into Oxford and doing all my work out there and sort of going for long walks. And
Jonathon Porritt
Those were happy days, but they were also days when I really revelled in solitude, and that's actually why I've um picked this this next piece of music, because I have a sort of peculiar interest or affection almost for the idea of the monastic life. And one thing that I really miss now in this hectic round of activity with Friends of the Earth is any opportunity for being alone and being more
Jonathon Porritt
reflective and just slowing down the pace of things and uh thinking much more about the deeper issues that matter to me. So I hope that this piece of music, the Nunctimittis, um sung by the choir of the Carmelite Priory will actually remind me of that more reflective side of life.
Speaker 3
Oh the darling earth
Speaker 3
Second of heaven to impart.
Speaker 1
Segundo vendu partre.
Speaker 1
Oh my God, and I see all that.
Jonathon Porritt
A man is wholly strong.
Speaker 1
Uh
Speaker 3
Some dark dream
Speaker 1
Solutor
Speaker 3
Lord, brethren, oh see all, and gentlemen, and glory all praise to him.
Speaker 1
Lord, where's the Lord and J.
Presenter
The nunc dimittis sung by the choir of the Carmelite Priory, London, directed by John McCarthy. Well, you didn't go into the church, Jonathan. You went you drifted into the law after graduating. There's a lovely story that you were on your way to court, I think, one day, and you decided to go to the zoo instead, and at that point you decided the law was not for you. Is there any truth in this story?
Jonathon Porritt
Um, it's it's almost true. I wasn't I wasn't on my way to court, but I was on my way to the um the college where I was studying law, and I'd been there for three months, and I had confronted the reality that I was not going to be a lawyer.
Jonathon Porritt
I really felt very bad about failing at something. There was a sort of strong.
Jonathon Porritt
Need to do well in everything that I did. And this was the first time that something had gone seriously wrong, and I found it quite uncomfortable. So I used to resort to the zoo, and I used to look at the antics of the monkeys and all the rest of it, and think to myself, Well, it can't be that bad. And when I was wandering around the zoo bunking off my law course, I eventually decided, let's face it, I'm not going to be a lawyer, let's do what I really want to do, which is to be a teacher. And in those days, there was such a shortage of teachers that I was able to get a job immediately, literally the day after I'd sort of decided that this wasn't going to work in the law.
Jonathon Porritt
Because there was a school in the East End in Newham.
Jonathon Porritt
which was short of three teachers, I think, in its English department. And so they would have taken anybody, frankly. And the fact that I didn't have a degree in English and the fact that I'd never taught English and the fact that I'd never been in a school of that kind before didn't make any difference at all. I was a body, and I was a body that could be stood in a classroom, and I was tall, which was an advantage, because if they threw things at me, I was likely to come back perhaps a little bit more strongly than others might have done.
Presenter
Well, you you went on teaching, didn't you, until what, about four years ago? Yeah.
Jonathon Porritt
Yeah, since I'm not sure.
Presenter
Do do you miss it now?
Jonathon Porritt
I still do, actually. Yes, I still miss contact with children.
Jonathon Porritt
Just that sense of joy in watching children grow up and learn things and suddenly discover things that weren't in them before.
Jonathon Porritt
I'm involved in teaching in a different kind of way now, and sometimes my audiences are almost as badly behaved as uh as they were in Shepherd's Bush, in a different way. But um I've often thought about whether or not I'll go back into teaching.
Presenter
Well, now it it it was, I understand, when you were head of drama and English at a school in Shepherdsbush that you found yourself
Presenter
ever more concerned about the the future of the earth and the danger of our doing nothing about it. How did that come about?
Jonathon Porritt
The English department wanted to do something to try and lift up the eyes of those children above the concrete jungle of Shepherd's Bush and to start thinking about an environment beyond that incredibly closed and often very violent and unpleasant environment. And so we used to do various things like take classes down to Wales where we'd stay in youth hostels and that was tremendous. And we also did quite a few projects about trying to envisage the future. What would the world look like in the year two thousand? And that made me read an awful lot about w what other people thought the world was going to be like in the year two thousand. And that was pretty gloomy reading, I must say. And the more I read, the more it kind of seized my mind that we were living
Jonathon Porritt
In a lunatic and irresponsible way.
Presenter
Were you already feeling political about it? Had you already joined the Ecology Party?
Jonathon Porritt
No, I joined the Ecology Party in 1975, and I'm I'm not quite sure why I ended up immediately joining the Ecology Party, which is now called the Green Party of course, because I could have joined a whole range of different organisations. But I was rather struck with the idea of a tiny band of people, which is what it then was, I mean really tiny, trying to put across a totally different vision of life. And I was really taken by the almost insane political courage involved in this, because at that time there was no real backing for it at all amongst people. And I can well remember some of the I'm sure, very well-meaning jokes and taunts of some of my friends, which indicated that as far as they were concerned, I was definitely moving onto the fringes very rapidly.
Presenter
Well, also, I mean, you you met time and again with enormous political indifference. You mean you're the veteran of many an an election campaign, general elections, European elections, local elections.
Jonathon Porritt
In general.
Speaker 1
Uh
Presenter
It does take is it courage to meet time and again with that kind of indifference?
Jonathon Porritt
Persistence, definitely. And a readiness to accept that you are not necessarily going to be successful in conventional terms, i. e. number of votes you gather.
Presenter
Shall we pause for some more music?
Jonathon Porritt
This the next piece I've chosen was something that I used to listen to a lot around this time when I was at school. Um I love guitar music and uh I was a particular fan, I suppose, of Santana, and this is a piece um of theirs called Samba Parti.
Presenter
Santana and Sambal Pati.
Presenter
How surprised were you, Jonathan Porritt, when towards the end of last year the Prime Minister told the Royal Society that to have a cavalier attitude towards our planet was a dangerous thing?
Jonathon Porritt
I was genuinely taken aback, I must admit, because, to be honest, there hadn't been any indication that Mrs Thatcher was going to get involved in the environment up until then. In fact, on one occasion she'd described the environment as humdrum and boring, and so we didn't know that this great this political voltfast was going to take place.
Presenter
And how has it changed your professional life?
Jonathon Porritt
A lot. It really has made quite a difference. I'm not sure whether she meant it this way, but of course what it has done is to give a
Jonathon Porritt
A level of credibility to the concerns of environmentalists that simply wasn't there before.
Jonathon Porritt
And for various reasons no politician
Jonathon Porritt
certainly not the opposition parties, had actually taken up environmental matters with any kind of campaigning fervour up until that point. Yes, I mean they had come out with some of the right noises about the environment and sounded fairly good on this policy, and were always there to be heard when there was a disaster or something had gone wrong.
Jonathon Porritt
But they hadn't actually seen the environment as being a priority that they would put in the same ranking as those other normal concerns that politicians have. So when Mrs Thatcher quotes went green, it changed the entire climate of opinion about environmental matters.
Presenter
But you are sometimes heard to be quite um sceptical about misses Thatcher's greenness, and to call her various names. I think you've called her an elastoplast environmentalist. Um I mean, should you be doing that? Why don't you just seize it with both hands and welcome it?
Jonathon Porritt
I think we do both, which may be confusing. We do welcome it with open hands, to be quite honest, because it is infinitely better to have world leaders of the stature of Mrs Thatcher out there saying the environment counts, indeed saying it is the greatest challenge we face between now and the end of the century.
Jonathon Porritt
than to have her out there disregarding the environment altogether. I think scepticism, however, is still justified on the basis of the track record, and that we're still really waiting for a change of policy
Jonathon Porritt
to match the change of heart. And you can only really judge someone in politics on the actions, not the words. The words come cheap. They're easy, basically. Green rhetoric is everybody's game these days. Green action is altogether another story.
Presenter
Of course, if you personally decided to stand as a candidate for an established party, you could perhaps achieve much of that which you seek to achieve.
Jonathon Porritt
I would find it enormously difficult, quite honestly, to join one of the major parties because I do have.
Jonathon Porritt
Really profound differences on critical issues like whether economic growth is the answer to all our prayers, whether our industrial society has the kind of values that are actually going to make life bearable or decent for people in the future, on the whole question of the distribution of wealth to the third world. And these are s such burning concerns for me that it isn't just a question about the environmental differences between us, it is a question about the whole structure of society and the world economic order. And so if I did join up with a major party instead of the Green Party, I think I would very quickly feel
Jonathon Porritt
ill at ease, and uh I'm not sure that I'd be very happy about that.
Presenter
Your fifth record, please.
Jonathon Porritt
This is a rather special record for me. It's it's a hymn, Hills of the North Rejoice. And I suppose that I will be sitting there on my desert island thinking about all the things that I'll be missing back home. And one of the things that I will be missing is good kind of gutsy renderings of good hymns. I love this hymn in particular because it also reminds me of the oneness of life on earth, north, south, east and west, and the fact that uh God's earth is something that we should all be working to protect.
Speaker 3
Forth rejoice, echoing songs arise Hail be delight, and voice in the earth and skies.
Speaker 3
But in my justice and love.
Speaker 3
And all the solar seas influences remote.
Speaker 1
The solemn sins.
Speaker 3
By the Olympic Lord.
Presenter
Hills of the North Rejoice by the Canterbury Cathedral Choir.
Presenter
Jonathan, the stories of man and the damage that he is doing to the environment are now in the news every day, it seems, and some of them apocalyptic i in their vision, London disappearing beneath water and the climate changing beyond recognition. I mean is in your view the the engine of destruction irreversible?
Jonathon Porritt
It's a very powerful engine, and there's no point underestimating its capacity for destruction, because it's wrapped everybody up in this great onward march towards what we call progress, which actually entails destroying all our life support systems in the process. So it is a powerful thing, there's no doubt about it. But I don't think it's irreversible. And what obviously we've all been engaged in doing is to slow down the engine and eventually to get a different vision of progress so that people stop bashing the earth in the process of trying to get richer. And I think what is happening now
Jonathon Porritt
is actually much more hopeful than anything that's happened before, partly because more and more individuals are saying, Well, hang on a minute, I can actually make a difference here. It may be small, it may be a tiny little thing in comparison to the size of the problem,
Jonathon Porritt
If you're talking about the loss of the ozone layer, for instance, through CFCs and other ozone-depleting chemicals, it may not seem much that one individual sh should say, right, I'm not going to buy this aerosol because it contains CFCs. But actually, when enough individuals say, I'm not going to buy this aerosol, that makes for a very powerful shift in society. And I think that it's fair to point out that actually going green in this fairly light green way is not enough, but it is a start. And I have a very strong belief that one ought to encourage people wherever they are, rather than kind of berate them for not being a darker hue of green, to actually encourage them step by step to see that there is more that they can do and the first step they've taken is only a first step towards a very different sustainable society.
Presenter
But what would a real dark green, as you call it, want us to do to morrow?
Jonathon Porritt
But a dark green would really pitch the challenge much more profoundly at the uh unsustainability of our existing industrial culture.
Presenter
And are you, as director of Friends of the Earth, not that dark green?
Jonathon Porritt
Friends of
Jonathon Porritt
exists to improve a system which we're landed with here and now. But I think a lot of us in it have darker green visions of where we should be going.
Presenter
But you prefer outwardly to be um an an optimistic lighter green.
Jonathon Porritt
Although we have to be careful about this, it is right actually to push more positive messages at people and to give them a sense of empowerment so that they feel they can do something. And also, I think it's important to start celebrating the earth, instead of being sheepish about this, actually to say, look, we have got this incredible miracle here to enjoy, and that if we learn to attune ourselves more finely and sensitively to the earth, it is a source of untold joy for people. And it doesn't cost you anything. It's there. It comes for free if we learn how to appreciate it properly. That's really why I've chosen for my next piece, which I'm glad that you allowed me, some of the music from the if you can call it music, from the humpback whale. And I've been a great devotee of whale music for many years and love these recordings. And it did also just occur to me that maybe as I'm sitting there worrying about whether I'm going to be able to grow my food on this island, that I may be able to commune with the whales by playing this record extremely loud, so they'll come and give me some sort of encouragement in my solitude.
Presenter
Humpback whale music or noises. You might get it for free, of course, Jonathan. You never know.
Jonathon Porritt
You never know, they might seek me out.
Presenter
Would it be fair to say that your um commitment to the environment i is is as much emotional as intellectual?
Jonathon Porritt
I think so, yes. I think that it's based on what what I would describe as intellectual, or scientific really. And that's come about because of the need to get things right, to be sure that your information is correct, and to know that you're not selling people a bum message because you're simply not using the factual information properly. So that's been very important, and that's the foundation on which a lot is built. But it's fair to say that underneath that, for me, there is an immensely powerful emotional theme running through a lot of what I do. And I doubt, frankly, that I would be that involved in this somewhat over-frenetic way if it wasn't a powerful emotional thing.
Presenter
Is it spiritual, too?
Jonathon Porritt
Yes, it is for me. I I genuinely do feel that there's a a sort of responsibility for each of us to do our bit, to work within God's earth rather than actually to um destroy it. And I'm also a bit of a pagan, that I don't find much difficulty relating to the living earth quite directly.
Jonathon Porritt
It would be a bit of an exaggeration to say that I go around talking to flowers or hugging trees all the time, but I feel no difficulty whatsoever in communing pretty effortlessly with nature, and also when I am
Jonathon Porritt
tired and depressed, and I begin to think about the unbelievable folly and irresponsibility of humankind. The easiest way of getting myself through that, quite honestly, is to just re engage with the earth, because you seem to get a different set of messages then.
Presenter
Course the public interest comes in spasms, doesn't it? I mean, when when whales are are trapped underneath the ice or when there's a disaster at a Russian nuclear power station, we're all desperately interested for a couple of weeks and then it all fades away again.
Jonathon Porritt
It doesn't all fade away again. And I think that the interesting thing is to see whether or not the general level of concern and awareness is increased by a tiny little bit once that spasm of concern has faded away, because it does fade away. That at that level it fades away very quickly.
Jonathon Porritt
But the fascinating thing for us is actually to see whether or not you've got a gradual increase, inching up, so that every time you get another reminder about the fragility of our life support systems or the
Jonathon Porritt
You know, the extent to which we're mucking it all up, that that reminder then adds to the general awareness that is gradually growing. And I think that's what's happening now. And it's true to say that people have probably forgotten most of the lessons specifically of Chernobyl now, and it won't be long before they forget all the problems about the death of the seals in the North Sea. But these things kind of lock away in the back of people's minds, and they're there as little niggles, little worries about whether we're doing it right.
Presenter
Another record, please.
Jonathon Porritt
I've chosen for my next record a favourite, I suppose, of lots of people, which is Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water.
Jonathon Porritt
And uh this will remind me in particular of the extent to which I'm had to give up most of my friends actually by being a friend of the earth because it is such a hopelessly frenetic life that there doesn't any longer seem to be time for friends in the way that there once was. And that's one of the things that makes me saddest. So this would actually remind me that when I do get back to my ordinary life from the from the island that I will put that to rights.
Speaker 3
Yeah.
Speaker 3
And tears are here.
Speaker 3
No I
Speaker 3
I will drive them.
Speaker 3
Yeah.
Presenter
Yeah.
Presenter
Simon and Garfunkel Bridge over troubled water.
Presenter
Your term at Friends of the Earth, Jonathan, comes to an end next year. You've said that there are no mainstream politics on the agenda. What can a linguist passionate about our planet do next?
Jonathon Porritt
I think I'm going to do um more writing and uh I hope more sort of speaking and that kind of thing. And I'm actually going to sort of take it a bit easy for a while, because I will have been six years at Friends of the Earth when I finish there this time next year, and there will certainly be space for a bit of consideration and reflection on the vast mass of things that have happened over the last six years. But I imagine one way or another I shall be just as actively involved as I am now.
Presenter
But you are, as as we've heard, what you might call an urban green. Is there part of you that would actually like to be living half way up a mountainside in Wales?
Jonathon Porritt
Yes, there is, actually, very much so. And I think it's quite likely that uh we'll move out of London. I'm not a natural country liver, it has to be said. I don't sort of feel a great yearning um to be in the countryside the whole time, and I don't feel that I can only be green if I'm out there in the in in the midst of those green fields. But equally, bringing up children and uh all the rest of it means that the call of the countryside is a bit louder now than it's ever been before.
Presenter
Yes, children focus the mind somehow. You have a a young baby daughter, six months old.
Jonathon Porritt
Yes, six months, yeah.
Presenter
Do you think of it in those terms, which I think an awful lot of people do? You know, what what kind of planet are we leaving behind for for the children? I mean, do you go to bed at night worrying about that future for them?
Jonathon Porritt
Well, the funny thing is that having worried about it in abstract terms, it's amazing now to have a a sort of living embodiment of the future there in our midst, as it were. And it does make it very much more compelling. It really does bring it home in the most astonishing way. And I've often thought, to be quite honest, that the saving of the planet, and therefore for me, the saving of humankind, will come because people start putting their children, their grandchildren, above them, and they'll start realizing that some of the things which we apparently demand now
Jonathon Porritt
are ruining the chances of the of the next generation. That's the only thing that is likely to provide a sufficiently powerful motivation to slow down the engine of destruction that we were talking about.
Speaker 1
Yeah.
Jonathon Porritt
Shall we have your last record?
Jonathon Porritt
The last record is some piano music, which I listen to a lot, and I've picked one of my favourite bits of piano music, which is Mozart's piano concerto number six.
Presenter
The second movement of Mozart's piano concerto number six in V flat major, played by Vladimir Ashkenazi with the Philharmonia Orchestra.
Presenter
Now which, Jonathan, of those eight do you hold most dear?
Jonathon Porritt
Well, I'm gonna pick the um the whale music.
Jonathon Porritt
Because I I think that's actually probably speaks to me more powerfully than all the music put together by human beings.
Presenter
And a book we can supply you with. You have the Bible and you have the complete Shakespeare.
Jonathon Porritt
I'm going to pick a Dickens novel. Um I've worried about this for a long time which one, whether it's going to be Bleak House or Little Dorrit, but eventually I have plumped for um Bleak House, because I I find Dickens totally absorbing, and I could disappear into his world whenever my world began to get rather boring.
Presenter
and a luxury which must be of no practical use whatsoever.
Jonathon Porritt
If I may, I would like to take a fountain pen.
Jonathon Porritt
which would not be functional, because I'd just be writing nice things and reflecting on the meaning of life. And I'm assuming that I'll be able to get ink from a squid and make my own paper from papyrus, which could stretch my ingenuity, I must admit. But I don't think I'd be able to make my own pen, so if I may, I'll take a fountain pen.
Presenter
Excellent. Jonathan Parrott, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.
Speaker 1
You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.
Presenter asks
What kind of boy were you at Eton? Can you describe yourself then?
Remarkably uncomplicated. Just life seemed to be incredibly easy. I enjoyed um working and I was very involved in in sports of every description and every minute of the day seemed to be full. And it's actually almost impossible now to imagine that life was just an uncomplicated flow of enjoyable experiences, which is what it was.
Presenter asks
How surprised were you when the Prime Minister told the Royal Society that to have a cavalier attitude towards our planet was a dangerous thing?
I was genuinely taken aback, I must admit, because, to be honest, there hadn't been any indication that Mrs Thatcher was going to get involved in the environment up until then. In fact, on one occasion she'd described the environment as humdrum and boring, and so we didn't know that this great this political voltfast was going to take place.
Presenter asks
You've called Mrs Thatcher an 'elastoplast environmentalist'. Should you be doing that? Why don't you just seize it with both hands and welcome it?
I think we do both, which may be confusing. We do welcome it with open hands, to be quite honest, because it is infinitely better to have world leaders of the stature of Mrs Thatcher out there saying the environment counts, indeed saying it is the greatest challenge we face between now and the end of the century. than to have her out there disregarding the environment altogether. I think scepticism, however, is still justified on the basis of the track record, and that we're still really waiting for a change of policy to match the change of heart. And you can only really judge someone in politics on the actions, not the words. The words come cheap. They're easy, basically. Green rhetoric is everybody's game these days. Green action is altogether another story.
Presenter asks
Is the engine of destruction irreversible?
It's a very powerful engine, and there's no point underestimating its capacity for destruction, because it's wrapped everybody up in this great onward march towards what we call progress, which actually entails destroying all our life support systems in the process. So it is a powerful thing, there's no doubt about it. But I don't think it's irreversible. And what obviously we've all been engaged in doing is to slow down the engine and eventually to get a different vision of progress so that people stop bashing the earth in the process of trying to get richer. And I think what is happening now is actually much more hopeful than anything that's happened before, partly because more and more individuals are saying, Well, hang on a minute, I can actually make a difference here. It may be small, it may be a tiny little thing in comparison to the size of the problem, … I have a very strong belief that one ought to encourage people wherever they are, rather than kind of berate them for not being a darker hue of green, to actually encourage them step by step to see that there is more that they can do and the first step they've taken is only a first step towards a very different sustainable society.
“I am a bit. It doesn't happen quite so much as it used to do, and I think, to be honest, most people now accept that environmentalists are normal human beings who have a range of human attributes that are not particularly eccentric, and I'm happy to say that those bad old days where it was so easy to stereotype us as weird and wacky have really passed away.”
“I planted trees on this bit of scrub land in the north of um the North Island. And it is to me the closest that I've ever got to interpreting that relationship with the earth in a completely non intellectual way, i. e. just an ordinary living um relationship, which is very hard to do when you're sunk in the middle of London and surrounded by concrete and tarmac and vehicle exhausts and all the rest of the wretched uh delights of so called civ civilization.”
“I think we do both, which may be confusing. We do welcome it with open hands, to be quite honest, because it is infinitely better to have world leaders of the stature of Mrs Thatcher out there saying the environment counts, indeed saying it is the greatest challenge we face between now and the end of the century. than to have her out there disregarding the environment altogether. I think scepticism, however, is still justified on the basis of the track record, and that we're still really waiting for a change of policy to match the change of heart. And you can only really judge someone in politics on the actions, not the words. The words come cheap. They're easy, basically. Green rhetoric is everybody's game these days. Green action is altogether another story.”
“It's a very powerful engine, and there's no point underestimating its capacity for destruction, because it's wrapped everybody up in this great onward march towards what we call progress, which actually entails destroying all our life support systems in the process. So it is a powerful thing, there's no doubt about it. But I don't think it's irreversible.”
“Well, the funny thing is that having worried about it in abstract terms, it's amazing now to have a a sort of living embodiment of the future there in our midst, as it were. And it does make it very much more compelling. It really does bring it home in the most astonishing way. And I've often thought, to be quite honest, that the saving of the planet, and therefore for me, the saving of humankind, will come because people start putting their children, their grandchildren, above them, and they'll start realizing that some of the things which we apparently demand now are ruining the chances of the of the next generation. That's the only thing that is likely to provide a sufficiently powerful motivation to slow down the engine of destruction that we were talking about.”