At a Downing Street reception in 2008, Dan glued his hand to Gordon’s jacket when he was about to receive an award for his activist work with Plane Stupid. Their intimate connection lasted for just 20 seconds, despite a month of intense glue-ing practice on Dan’s housemate. His plea to make the prime minister "stick to his environmental promises" (BBC) stuck around for a little longer.

Dan has been involved with Plane Stupid since their start in 2005. The group uses non-violent direct action to stop aviation expansion. Dan explains: “Aviation is one of the fastest-growing causes of climate change. Plane Stupid does direct interventions to stop airport expansion and hinder airplanes from taking off. Every kg CO2 we can stop from being put in the atmosphere counts: It’s an issue of self defence and recently the court has started to recognise this. Secondly, we do publicity stunts: cheeky stuff that captures the popular imagination like climbing on top of the Scottish parliament.” The group has so far occupied Stansted, East Midlands, and Aberdeen airports, shut down EasyJet and BAA’s headquarters and stopped private jets at Biggin Hill, London City and Edinburgh airports. Dan: “I think we have to be critical and divorce the law from our rights: the law can be morally and practically wrong, so sometimes it’s OK to stand up to to it.”

Besides Plane Stupid, Dan therefore works with So We Stand, a popular education movement  that supports UK communities impacted by environmental injustice. Dan: “Social injustice, like poverty and racism, often comes hand in hand with environmental injustice like pollution. Impacted communities should be the very first to speak and not always have to rely on scientists and politicians. Popular education programs are a critical tool for empowerment and for joining the dots between the big issues and the people affected. They are the cement that build the movement for direct action.”

So We Stand envisions a broad popular movement demanding social change: “Climate change will only increase issues like poverty, state oppression, racism, refugees...  So with So We Stand, we try to build alliances of groups concerned with any one of these issues and join their experiences and knowledge. Around Heathrow airport, for example, we brought the Asian community, which is disproportionally affected by the pollution, in contact with climate activists. We also try to bring affected communities together so that they can see they’re not alone, that their struggles are part of a bigger struggle. In this way, we generate passion to tackle the root cause of the problem - the system itself.”

According to Dan, this broader-based “climate justice movement” is steadily growing: “The climate movement has finally stopped being a privileged movement.” The international climate movement is, according to Dan, also rapidly on the rise, as people in, for example, Pakistan and Bangladesh, are more and more suffering from floods and other immediate impacts of climate change. Within this movement, activists in the UK can play a big role, says Dan: “Here, in the belly of the beast, we are able to tackle company headquarters and parliaments which can have a great knock-on effect on third world countries.”

When asked about his motivations to take action, he answers: “I think it’s incredibly interesting to be alive now. Our generation has both responsibility and opportunity: we’re the last generation able to tackle climate change and 50 years down the line, the next generation will either thank us for what we’ve done or condemn us for not having done enough. The thing is, it’s no rocket science, we all know what to do: stop burning fossil fuels. I sometimes can’t help thinking that the next generation, or the next dominant species, will look back at us and think: Wow, they were réally stupid... Besides this feeling of embarrassment, what motivates me to take action is what I love rather than what I fear: I enjoy walking in the park, I enjoy breathing fresh air, I enjoy biodiversity. All this enriches my life.”

“An apocalyptic vision of the world’s future can be paralysing. People easily think: Shit, I’ll just put my head in the sand! Of course, we should not forget the grim facts and predictions, but we should first and foremost act to create the kind of world we’d like to see. Plus, we should be creative and just really enjoy the process of action. Super glue-ing myself to Gordon Brown was a hell of a lot of fun!”

Now, the big question is, of course, who will be his next glue-victim... “I think about this a lot! I will probably choose one of the many people that are still profiting from denial, from lying for a living. Climate change and its impact are so well recognised today that whoever is behind RBS (that supports environmentally destructive projects -red.) and the like, and anyone supporting them, should really be held accountable.”