A revolution in the air

Spending your holidays in a field next to the busiest airport in the world might sound like a crazy idea to some, but for Mandy Meikle the real madness is across the fields, beyond the police sentinels and the wire at Heathrow.

We're sitting around the remains of last night's camp fire in the Scottish barrio, one of the tented villages spread out around the toilet block. There's a bucket of berries picked from around the camp and a few scorched pieces of pallet wood in what was the fireplace.

"The insanity is what gets me," says Mandy, who has come from Woolfords, near West Calder, to bear witness against a third runway for Heathrow. "It's crazy," she says. "We're still in a planet where profit is more important than the environment."

That, in a nutshell, is the raison d'etre of the Camp for Climate Action and why 1000 people have spent the week in a damp field west of London, mulling over how they will try to reverse the planet's priorities.

It won't win them allies at the check-in queues over the wire, but most protesters are agreed that direct action against the British Airport Authority (BAA), which owns Heathrow, is inevitable.

It will probably involve disruption at the airport, but just what kind of direct action everyone will take this weekend has still to be decided, according to our camp guide Jess Worth. Camp inhabitants meet daily in democratic forums to decide on action. "It means you have to listen to a lot of people talking but it is very fair," says Worth.

Police leave has been cancelled, mild intimidation and surreal counter-action are the order of the day, as protesters and law enforcers engage in a ritualistic dance ahead of today's expected confrontation. The action might take place early and it might be at a completely different location, like Friday's super-glueing stunt at the Department of Transport.

Seven campaigners have been charged with criminal damage after superglueing their hands to the glass doors of the DoT for an hour.

After the 24 hours of action at Heathrow is over, the climate change campaigners will go back to activism across Britain, but the people who live next to the airport will have to live with the uncertainty.

If a third runway goes ahead by 2020 - and the economic and planning arguments are stacked in its favour - then it's lace curtains for the whole village of Sipson and most of Harlington. It would be goodbye to the scout hall, the Glendale medical centre, the Airfix model shop and Gina's hair salon - all the ingredients of the beltway town that now exists to serve the giant airport next door.

In their flourishing front garden on Sipson Lane, Margaret and John Mulhearn are more than happy to cheer the young protesters on the way down the road.

"These climate people are not here just to stop the runway, but we're glad they're here, we're very pleased to see them," says Margaret, who took her grandchildren to the camp earlier in the week. She was born in the area. Her mother worked in the orchards that the airport swallowed up and her uncle drove a horse and cart with the produce to Covent Garden market. She doubts that she will die here; her house would be demolished to make way for a third runway.

"BAA is riding roughshod over local people," says John, originally from Donegal. "I used to work at Heathrow. It's big enough as it is and there's no need to expand here. It will just mean more chaos, not less."

Whatever effect a third runway will have on the the accursed congestion at the airport is debatable. The chaos that may be caused to passengers this weekend is a more immediate concern. "We're still deciding on what mass action will be on Sunday but, whatever it is, it will be in solidarity with the local people," says Jess Worth. She finds the support of local people empowering, although the aircraft taking off and landing every 30 seconds in the background prove that most of the population has still to be convinced. Most of the protesters are angry at reports that they plan to bring the airport to a standstill with hoax bomb alerts. They suspect that they are being smeared by BAA and a complicit media. Journalists aren't popular on the site, although there are plenty present on organised trips or merging in with the campers.

"The action will be entirely peaceful. That's the ethos of everyone here but the police will do everything at their disposal to stop us," says Worth. "We'll probably end up breaking the law to do the right thing." Worth herself isn't keen on getting arrested, but there are many in the camp more than willing to risk a criminal record.

Patrick Nicholson and Andrea Needham are pushing their three-year-old daughter Esme's buggy through the long grass to the hardboard walkway that is the main thoroughfare.

Esme's emerald-green Tinkerbell outfit, the adults' waterproofs-and-shorts combination, and Nicholson's campaigning work as a cycling activist tick all the boxes of a bohemian, ecological family unit. (It's frowned on in some environmental circles to have more than a single child.) They'd look the part in a picture of a family beach barbecue in Hastings (where they've come from for the week), but pretty soon they could be mugshots in a police gallery.

"It feels like the right time to make a public statement," says Nicholson. "It feels like we're reaching a tipping point and that people are beginning to get their heads around the idea of climate change. People need to see a critical mass of people coming together, trying to make a difference."

Andrea Needham is even more determined to make a mark this weekend. "People think it's okay to protest so long as it's business as usual but this is the biggest issue we've ever had to face," says Andrea. "This is bigger than breaking the law. This is bigger than people's right to go on holiday or a businessman's need to fly to Munich on Monday morning. Those freedoms are going to have to be compromised against the freedoms of future generations."

For a mild-mannered mum she packs some punch. "I just don't think that people have the right to fly. Inconveniencing people and breaking the law can be justified."

Thanks to the attempt to prevent the protest with an injunction that would stretch to Paddington station and ban protesters from an area wider than Heathrow itself, the climate camp has had incredible publicity and a degree of sympathy. How they harness the publicity they have garnered is a delicate balance between the urgent environmental instincts shared by many in the camp and the need to maintain public support.

Most are ready to fight BAA with surrealism. A phalanx of sackclothed monks goes past, arms outstretched like aeroplanes. A group of people are standing in a circle in the grass rehearsing what sounds like a hymn. It has been penned by the group, explains Sam Chase, as a "memorial to the world we have lost and a celebration of what we are trying to achieve".

Will they achieve anything? "Ultimately there has to be an economic acceptance that this can't go on," says Jon Hughes, the deputy editor of Ecologist magazine, who has spent the morning traipsing around the site.

This month his magazine warns the green movement against "global boring", the danger that conservationism will be seen as a fad, and is bending over backwards to make ecology chic with an exclusive interview with actor-activist Leonardo DiCaprio.

"Either we go through a period of self-imposed austerity or an environmental catastrophe will force a change in behaviour, by which time it might be too late," says Hughes, depressed by the news that the government has admitted it will have to cheat to meet its own climate change targets.

Convention has it that any campaign making demands that are politically unachievable will fail. Short of an extreme weather catastrophe or an oil crash, convincing people to give up flying is going to be a struggle. Hughes adds that tackling the carbon emissions of aircraft is more likely to be achieved by technological improvement and emissions trading than by invading an airport.

Back at the climate change camp, that view would be as welcome as a journalist turning up at the Composting Capitalism workshop. The meeting takes place in a circle on a straw-floored marquee. We're met with hostile stares and the participants clamp up until we leave. The whiff of paranoia is almost as palpable as the smell of pee.