A climate of change

Only three people in the world are in on the secret of where the second Camp for Climate Action is going to set up next week. All anyone else - including the rest of the 150-strong organising team - knows is that it will be somewhere near Heathrow airport. If they want to find out exactly how near, they are to be at Staines railway station in west London on Tuesday by 10am. Then, after many months of planning, all will be revealed.

Though as many as 1,500 people are expected for the six-day gathering, no one even seems sure who will be there, beyond the activists, scientists, farmers, anti-capitalists and local residents who have already publicly RSVP-ed.

It's irritating for the 600 police charged with protecting one of the world's biggest airports from disruption at a time of heightened terrorism concerns - not to mention the 1,800 extras who will be drafted in next week. And it's confusing for BAA, which on top of all its other woes believes Heathrow will be disrupted in one of the busiest weeks of the year.

This, though, is the new face of protest in Britain - somewhere between a DIY Glastonbury and Seattle, a rave and a seminar, with as broad a cross-section of people as can be found in Britain. The camp will be somewhere with no leaders, no named groups, no constitutions, and no chairman, but where people organise themselves, with all decisions made by consensus. Together they will erect a tented sustainable town, set up wind and solar power systems, plumb compost toilets, schedule 100 workshops, provide catering and music, bars, shuttle buses - and then break off to hold a day of mass protest that will involve direct, and quite probably illegal, action.

The catalyst was last year's first climate camp at Drax power station in Yorkshire, when at least 600 people spent a week plotting a new utopia. They failed to close Drax, Britain's biggest power station, but it took thousands of police officers from seven forces to stop them.

The camp spawned other radical climate change groups around Britain. Every month since, meetings have been held to discuss the next action.

As well as young activists concerned about climate change, the new movement is trying to harness the increasing anger of people who live near Heathrow. Linda McCutcheon's motivation for attending the camp is pretty simple: if Heathrow is granted its third runway, her house and the village, Sipson, where she has lived for 41 years, will be gobbled up by asphalt.

The camp will attract the establishment, too. "I'm going to get the message to BAA that opposition to airports is anything but fringe," says Susan Kramer, Liberal Democrat MP for Richmond Park. "It comes from mainstream law-abiding residents who have suffered long enough. My constituents are not 'nimbies'. They live under the flight path.

"We've been protesting about Heathrow expansion for years. We have lost any faith in consultations and any expectation that our voice will be heard...We say enough is enough."

At a meeting this week in a church hall in Harlington, near the airport, 50 local residents came to hear what the organisers of the climate camp had to say. Many are members of the No Third Runway Action Group, and were horrified when the organisation got caught up in the fiasco over the BAA injunction against the camp: its chair, Geraldine Nicholson, was named in the original injunction application. Though her name was not on the final document, this brush with the law has left many locals frightened of being associated with illegality.

This has put off at least one activist from attending altogether: Father Phil Hughes is the Anglican chaplain at Heathrow airport and the vicar for nearby Harmondsworth parish. "I think the Camp for Climate Change makes a valid point, and I am 100% against the proposed third runway and further airport expansion, but I believe in peaceful protest and diplomacy and think the campaign wrong-foots itself when it involves direct action. It is totally wrong to attempt to disrupt the operation of Heathrow airport," he says.

So who are these new activists? Penny, an organiser, said: "Some [of us] come out of the anti-capitalist movement, others from the broad green movement. The politics are reasonably anti-capitalist, but there are people with no allegiances, and others for whom this will be a first experience. If there are any [group] ethics it would probably be naming econom- ic growth as the problem with climate change, and a respect for direct action."

It's a new movement, says John Stewart, a veteran road protester who now runs the Heathrow Association for the Control of Aircraft Noise (Hacan), the moderate group of 25,000 increasingly bitter people who live near Heathrow. He was also one of the three men named on the final BAA injunction, which banned him, along with Josh Garman and Leo Murray of anti-aviation group Plane Stupid, from interfering with the running of the airport.

"What is emerging now is similar to the road protests in the early 1990s," Stewart says. "At places like Twyford you had locals who had been fighting a road for years and then they got together with young environmentalists whose concerns were wider. There is this bond which can only get stronger."

For the activists, climate change is absolutely top of the agenda. Muzammal Hussain, 35, in 2004 founded the London Islamic Network for the Environment. He is going to visit the camp primarily, he says, to educate himself and attend workshops. "I think I may attract curiosity as a Muslim at the camp, but environmentalism is crucial to Islamic teaching," he says. "The Koran says that we are guardians of the Earth and have a responsibility to look after it. Many imams have traditionally not quite grasped this, though that is changing."

Dom Marsh, 24, believes the camp will be an opportunity to demonstrate practical solutions to climate change. He is the office coordinator of the Permaculture Association (Britain). From the point of view of the camp, that means promoting non-polluting compost toilets, using bikes and recycling waste water.

"I hope the camp will be a good example of how non-hierarchical organisations can achieve change and a model for living in harmony with nature," he says.

You might think that Cristina Fraser would be put off attending the camp after what happened to her last month. The 19-year-old anthropology student was riding her bike on a cycle track near Heathrow with a friend when they were stopped by police and arrested under Section 58 of the Terrorism Act, which created the offence of collecting or possessing "information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism". All Fraser claims to have been in possession of was an ice-cream recipe, but she was kept in a cell for 30 hours.

"It was terrifying while I was in there," she says. "No one knew where I was. They knew I wasn't a terrorist. They found it confusing. Later they de-arrested me on the terrorism charge and re-arrested me on another."

Mohamed Adow, 28, from Kenya, has arguably been affected more directly by climate change than anyone else attending the camp. He works for the NGO Northern Aid, a Muslim group working with subsistence farmers and pastoralists in north-east Kenya's Mandera district.

"In 2005-2006, the drought killed 70% of livestock in northern Kenya, and now 80% of the 3 million people living in the region are dependent on food aid. It's not a future problem, it is already ruining the lives of the poor people I work with."

Dr Simon Lewis, 35, a scientist working at the Earth and Biosphere Institute at the University of Leeds, will deliver a lecture on climate change. "I think it's important that people get the relevant information and the measured scientific view on what the consensus is, what the remaining controversies are and what we still don't know," he says.

Lewis, who was arrested 15 years ago on another protest, says he thinks direct action can be "totally acceptable", but will wait and see what next week's action is before joining in himself. "All through history people have had to step out of line to gain new rights - just think about slavery and votes for women."