Herding Hedgehogs!

a creative collision of culture and climate

A herd of hedgehogs and other wonderful wildlife is on a 20,000km journey from the rainforest of the Congo Basin to the Arctic.

The Herds are made up of life-sized puppets and are symbolising the flight of nature from the onslaught of a changing climate. It is an amazingly ambitious coming together of art and climate action - of culture and climate - and I believe is really important.

The importance is in the combinations. For years I believed that telling people facts, learned from reading and experience, was going to be enough to change minds and actions. But the evidence has grown and grown showing that data are not enough - if we are to have any hope of encouraging people to start protecting hedgehogs, and the ecosystems on which they rely, we need stories. We need to engage people with both the head and the heart.

And this is what the team behind The Herd are doing - with great effect.

Do you remember Little Amal? Back in October 2021 she did an amazing journey as she fled from Syria, bringing with her a bag of memories. Little Amal was not so little, being a 4m tall puppet controlled with great skill to really come alive. In Oxford she met with a similar size Alice (from the Wonderland) - and it was one of the most moving cultural events of the year for me.

The point of telling you about the amazing Amal is that this is the same team - they have moved their attention from the plight of refugees fleeing violence to the plight of nature fleeing the slow violence we humans have delivered to the natural world.

And it is not just Hedgehogs, of course! Our Hedgehogs are the representative species for the European Forests. The Sahara has the Fennec Fox, Puffins from the Arctic, the Mediterranean is represented by a Sea Turtle, a Flamingo from the Central African Mangroves, and from the Congo Basin, where the journey began, a Pangolin.

Please have a rummage through the vast resources in the Education portion of their website - where you will also find my small contribution, a video about the basics of hedgehog life.

There are guides as to how to make your own cardboard versions - as well as stories around the threats the animals and their habitats face.

The Herd will be in London 27-29th June and in Manchester from 3-5th July - and I really sad that it looks like I won’t be able to get to any of this in person. To find details of where you might be able to catch this peculiarly wonderful puppets - check this link.

As I write this I realise quite how sad I am to miss seeing The Herd - I feel this combination of fact and story - head and heart - is something I strive to achieve in my own work.

Let me know if you get to see them - and I look forward to seeing pictures … and if you want a different view of what I have been up to - you can see some of mine on Instagram.