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“Yeah, prison . . .” she says. “I was put in a cell with this really scary woman. She kept saying, ‘Ooh, you’re cute, you’ll do really well in Holloway [the women's prison in north London].’ I spent the whole night awake in the corner.” She was released the next day with a slap on the wrist. Three weeks later, at the court hearing for the parliamentary climb, she was given a conditional discharge. “There’s a fine line between legal and illegal,” she says. “The reason I’ve been able to do as much as this is that I walk that line incredibly carefully.” There is something undeniably sexy about a posh rebel, irrespective of your political leanings. Tatler may be all over her (she politely declined the horse idea on the grounds that she “isn’t Lady Godiva or Joan of Arc and hasn’t actually made anything change yet”), but, truthfully, it doesn’t sound as if there’s actually a lot of cash left in the family, and the whole idea of being blue-blooded doesn’t mean much to her anyway. In the grand tradition of middle-class protest, though, you need to know the rules to break them. “Obviously I’m really respectable, obviously I care about what’s right, otherwise I wouldn’t do this,” she says. “But then I guess I use quite mischievous methods of getting the message out.”

How far would she go? “We have maybe four years left to effectively slow down climate change and I’m prepared to do anything I can to help do that.” Would you die for it? “Would my dying make climate change stop? I don’t reckon it would. If it did, I might. No, actually, I don’t wanna die.”

She’s far more worried about the elitist image of being green than dying. “Everyone should feel as if they’re part of something. Because we are. We’re all in this together.”

She is absolutely a child of our time, a perfect icon in the age of Obama. Not only because she also understands the power of image, but because she knows that you are nothing without something to say, particularly now, when the world is clamouring for substance. When I ask who her heroes are, she replies: “Nobody inspired me, the situation we’re in inspired me.”

In our “famocratic” era, where everyone can be famous for nothing, fame is no longer a meaningful goal. Now it’s less about whether you get your 15 minutes — because, don’t worry, you will — and more to do with what you’re going to do with them.

As it happens, the seeds of Tamsin’s revolution have already been sown on the internet. Kids are mobilising on Facebook and MySpace in much the same way that they’d organise a party. It’s never been easier to get a message out there. For her part, Tamsin is open to all comers on her Facebook page and Climate Rush website. “I love it when you meet people, and you get on really well, and you have these conversations, and afterwards, you’re really connected and you really love them, and it’s really intense, and you’re in a situation that’s sort of like . . . we’re connecting! Our generation’s got that, I guess — that openness is what we’ve grown up with. Brits aren’t all stiff upper lip any more.”

A week later, it’s the shoot for this story, and Omond turns up wearing a T-shirt that declares “This isn’t about me”. So what is it about, then? “Creating a mass movement on an unprecedented scale. Hundreds and thousands of youths climbing all over carbon-emitting things. And huge social change. I know it’s possible.”

But what’s in it for her? “For me, it’s about this far-off point in 40 years’ time. I don’t want humanity to have been a meaningless thing that destroyed itself. I want to know that, whatever happens, there was a struggle and I was part of it. I want to at least be able to say to my kids that I tried.”

THE PROTEST RAVERS

How many 4am sunrises can you watch from a field somewhere along the M4 corridor, the doors of perception, er, wide open, and not be left wondering how permanent it all is? The current generation of thirtysomething former ravers are rebonding to protect what, as 20-year-olds, they took for granted.

The biggest raver environmentalist of them all was Joe Strummer, the late lead singer of the Clash. The story of how the former punk helped spread the idea of planting trees to offset carbon emissions — after a campfire conversation at Glastonbury festival in 1996 with Keith Allen and the guy who came up with the idea in the first place, Dan Morrell — has gone down in eco lore.

In early September, the ethical outdoor clothing brand Howies ran a lecture and party weekend called the Do lectures (dolectures.co.uk), attended by everyone from Gavin Pretor-Pinney, author of The Cloudspotter’s Guide, to Yun Hider, Gordon Ramsay’s foraging expert.

And last month, Rory Spowers, a mate of Zac Goldsmith and founder of the charity 999itstime.com, hosted a gathering of eco-activists at his home in Surrey. Among them were George Barker, one of the names behind the 1990s Flying Rhino parties; David de Rothschild, who runs the charity Adventure Ecology, and his girlfriend, who he met at this year’s Burning Man festival; and that well-known bon viveur Bruce Parry, whose Ibiza parties are fast becoming the stuff of legend.

For two full days and nights, starting after breakfast, the group sat around a large table thrashing out ideas about how to harness their skills, contacts and ideas to help save the planet. “The clever ones are thinking about this stuff all the time,” said de Rothschild. As Parry concluded: “Our greatest joy is going to be in realising how much more brilliant community, family and talking to friends can be than shopping,” unintentionally describing the founding principles of old rave itself.

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