OPT - Jonathan Porritt Transcript: "As far as my own personal view about where that will take us goes I would just leave you I imagine with the state of confusion that your probably all in already. I spend most of my life today trying to avoid what I call Lovelockian despair.

Jim Lovelock is an astonishing man and an amazing charismatic figure, one of the scientists I have the most respect for in the world today and I'm a scared of all that because I've always though of Jim being something different and very special.

But the truth of it is when you hear Jim talk about his own unique brand of apocalyptic optimism, this is optimism premised on the death of around 6 billion people which for me is a tough line in optimism I have to say, once you hear him really roll that out that there is a lot of hope for the future of humankind bit of a shame we got to go through a bit of a turbulent period first with massive incalculable awful pain inflicted on human societies I cant really share with Jim the sense that thats the right way to engage people in this debate.

So I'm kind of nervous, because i have a horrible suspicion at the back of my brain which i don't really let out that often that Jim is more likely to be right than more people I know today. But I've allowed myself this illusion that we probably still have a window of time to prove people like Jim wrong.

It isn't a very big window, no point putting years on it but it's really quite short as we all know. and if we can't do what we need to do with that short window of time then the intellectually honest position will be unavoidable which is then we are talking about managing an astonishing holocaust in terms of the way human beings manage there own future.

So that's up the anti in terms of urgency of which we need to share this agenda and I think it leaves all of us in a quite difficult position psychologically which is needing to empower other people to do what needs to be down without crushing them with the despair of a Lovelockian world view, this is tricky stuff frankly and we're all involved in that and thank god at least a group of people like this knows that population has to be part of that, not an irrelevant adjunct to it."