Inside Heathrow’s protest camp: A battle to save the world

If you happen to be passing through Hatton Cross this weekend, you will see a swollen army of police officers equipped with weapons and video cameras and peeved expressions. They will greet you at the entrance to the Tube stations, to the airport, and on every corner, and they will probably film your face as you walk by. They are ready and raring to use the new anti-terror laws. So you might wonder – has Osama bin Laden been spotted in the vicinity?

No. A legion of environmentalists, committed to non-violent direct action, have erected an array of marquees and wind turbines and compost toilets in an empty field. As I spent this week with them, I discovered they have one purpose: to urge us to listen to the world’s scientists and cut back on our greenhouse gas emissions – before we descend into climate chaos we cannot reverse and may not survive.
Alice James is sitting outside the bright white Children’s Tent in the makeshift protest-city that has risen in an empty field next to Heathrow. The 26-year-old is a PhD student in atmospheric physics and she is watching her son bounce merrily on a trampoline as she explains, “We are trying to say to the people over there” – she points at Heathrow – “Do you know the connection between your flight and the hurricanes and the floods and the droughts we are seeing intensify across the world? Do you care?” She is drowned out by the roar of a cheap flight far above. Sitting later in my leaking tent, watching the Climate Camp bustle by, it seems like a surreal splicing of Glastonbury, a science seminar, and the civil rights movement. On every corner, people are discussing the nature of the warming world we are rapidly bringing to boiling point.

At one end, Mayer Hillman, the 76-year-old climate-change campaigner, is saying to a crowd: “We are on a trajectory towards the extinction of life on earth. In the main, people have done this unwittingly, so it can be excused. But now we know what we are doing, and it cannot be excused.”

Further along, hundreds more are discussing how Britain can claw back its emissions, whether it’s through a new, much better coach network or a Europe-wide electrical super-grid. These “unemployed layabouts” and “stupid hippies” (copyright Talksport Radio) must be the most scientifically qualified protesters in history, with every other person seemingly a science graduate.

[…]

Standing not far from these police vans, environmental campaigner George Monbiot summarises the stakes to a pensive crowd. He quotes from a scientific paper by Nasa’s Professor James Hansen, which says that the last time the world warmed by 2-3 degrees C in such a short time, the world’s major ice sheets collapsed very quickly – and sea levels rose by 25 metres. “If that happens again,” he says, “it would inundate the areas where 60 per cent of human beings live.” The assembled Climate Camp listens to this statistic with a sad but unsurprised revulsion.

By gathering here, we have shown that at least a few thousand people are sane enough to wave and shout as the ice-sheets fall – even if the rest of the world strolls silently by into a shiny new jetplane to Hell.

The Independent