Jonathon Porritt on consumption habits

I’ve been at this business 45 years, OK? And I suspect that the first meeting of the Green Party that I went to when I was a raw, unsophisticated campaigner at the age of 24– I guess the first question would be, yeah, brilliant, but what are we meant to do? And it’s still the same question. And I ask myself, you’re not trying. You know what you bloody well should be doing. It really isn’t that difficult. You know what you should be doing, to think conscientiously about your own pattern of consumption, to think about your energy use, to think about transportation, to think about all these issues to do with food.

This is not some choice that you can put off until you’re my age, 66 years old, and then you’ll get round to making some sensible choices about food. Nobody, particularly young people today, should ever eat beef again. Simple one off recommendation, if you want an accelerated route to a lower carbon lifestyle, don’t eat beef, OK? If you want to go into the details of that, you can, but it’s just– I’m trying to give you something straight off the top of my head here. So I get a little bit angry with people who say, what do we do?

Because if you’ve got a tiny splinter of curiosity in you and some passing interest in your own future well-being and you can find a way of getting onto the internet, you will discover what you need to do in so many different compelling, beautiful, creative, extraordinarily, inspiring ways that it will transform your life. So I’m a little bit reluctant about offering up too much lifestyle advice, although I’ve just done exactly that, so apologies for inconsistency. But that’s what the life of a sustainability–