Supporter of the week: Liz Jensen

Hannah Booth

11 August 2011

To celebrate Friends of the Earth's 40th anniversary, I've been talking to some of the supporters who've made it all possible. Liz Jensen (right) is a novelist who decided to grapple with the implications of climate change, artistically.

"My last novel, The Rapture, had climate change as its theme. I'm beginning to think it's the only subject I can write about.

Climate change is so huge, so important - I felt I couldn't avoid it.

"I wrote the novel as a way of finding out where I stood. I talked to a lot of climate scientists and geologists, and the more my knowledge deepened, the more worried I became.

"It's important to get the science as right as possible - but my mission wasn't so much to inform, as to pose a question: 'What if climate change happened even faster than we think?'

"It's not a campaigning novel - I'm not a scientist, or in charge of policy. I treated the subject in an artistic way because that's what I do. 

"Anyone who has children, or is thinking of having children has to ask: what is the planet going to look like when they're old? What legacy is my generation leaving them?

"Most sceptics I've met haven't read the science. They see themselves as mavericks, romantic eccentrics.

"Life would be easy if you were a climate change sceptic, you wouldn't have to think about the consequences of anything you do."

Next week: Kurt Jackson. To see all the supporters I've interviewed, visit our 40th anniversary gallery.
Hannah Booth also writes Lives Less Ordinary.