A young woman watches an enormous mechanical digger tear into the earth below, its jaws edging closer to the village she is determined to save.
The town of Ltzerath is on the verge of being swallowed up by a huge coal mine.
The activists who are standing in the way of the expansion of the Garzweiler opencast mine will be evicted if they don't leave by Tuesday.
Bente Opitz says it's why they took to the trees.
She says it's difficult for the police to evict them. There are ropes between the treehouses so we can move between them.
The protesters are busy too. Young men and women with scarves covering their faces are helping to load wheelbarrows with bricks.
There were a lot of marks on the road at the entrance to the village.
Ltzerath is home to the dirtiest form of coal. The mine, a bleak and dull brown man-made canyon which spans over 35 square kilometres, yields 25 million of the stuff every year.
The village is owned by the energy company RWE. The residents' houses are no longer standing. The protesters are squatting in the old brick buildings to watch the mine grow.
The fight for Ltzerath has been going on for a while. Russia's war on Ukraine has changed it into a national symbol of the struggle within German politics and society, how does a country which relied so heavily on Russian gas now balance its needs with its ambitions on climate change?
The Germans would say that the government had to swallow some toads. Ministers who came to power promising to end reliance on coal have found themselves ordering a number of old coal fired power stations back online or delaying plans to decommission others.
Ltzerath is likely to be the last German village to be affected by coal mining.
Garzweiler lies in North Rhine-Westphalia, where the government plans to phase out coal by the year 2030.
The extension of the mine has been limited by RWE and the regional government.
According to RWE, Germany needs the lignite under Ltzerath under the current circumstances because of its dependence on fossil fuels.
They want to stop them from getting to it.
They're throwing the Paris agreement in the bin if they dig for coal, according to protester Dina Hamid. RWE says that's not true.
She says that people are dying from the climate crisis.
"If we don't want this to continue, we need to save every bit of coal, every bit of fossil fuel in the ground."
Dina admits that there are differing opinions in the camp on how far their resistance should go, but she insists that her protest will be peaceful.
Some of the people who have been living on the site for more than a year are going to be joined by more supporters. Police officers, some in riot gear, stand close by, wary, as some of the protesters link arms and form a line just a few meters away from the giant digger bearing down on the village.
The officers and the activists weredwarfed by the great mechanical teeth working away at the earth in front of them.
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