A judge is due to decide whether to authorise a fresh round of forced police evictions in Notre-Dame-des-Landes. Photograph: Jean-Sébastien Evrard/AFP/Getty Images

Alain, meet Miranda; Miranda, Alain.  You both have done your part to reverse a long history of human unfriendliness to trees.  Those efforts strengthen the likelihood of additional collective action:

The protesters, including farmers, locals and green politicians, argue that building a brand new airport for France’s sixth largest city, which already has an award-winning airport, is both an environmental disaster and a waste of public money during an economic crisis. Support groups have sprung up across France.

“We are the resistance,” said Alain, an electricity technician, who has rented his farmhouse for 20 years and whose dairy farmers ancestors have been rooted here since the 17th century. But the kitchen sits on the exact spot where the planned control tower will go. He, his partner, Marie, and their children should have left in July to allow the house to be demolished. They stayed, and are now considered squatters. Marie, a secretary, said: “Some of the environmental protesters living in self-built wood cabins have been here for years with their families and children. They refuse to give up and so do we. I can’t believe the French left is acting like this, refusing to listen to the ecological arguments, and sending in totally disproportionate force against us.”

From the house, a long, muddy walk deep through the forest leads to a series of intricate, makeshift roadblocks, manned at all hours. In a clearing, 40 tractors are chained together to protect the entrance to the Châtaignerie, a forest camp and communal living headquarters, with elaborate wooden huts. Volunteers are dishing out vegetable soup, activists are discussing schemes to plant vegetables, there is a bar, sanitary block and communications office with pirate radio frequency. If, as protesters say, the codename for the gendarmes’ eviction operation is Operation Caesar, the squat is a kind of Asterix village, surrounded on all sides but holding out.