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At 11 o clock at night – still quite hot - in a London park this week – I took part in the public art project ‘The Herds’. People of all ages were walking through the darkness looking for hundreds of animals that, over these months, are travelling the 20,000 km from the Congo Basin to the Arctic Circle. The Herds are life sized corrugated cardboard puppets, strikingly moving, and fragile, worked by teams of volunteers.

The project’s director Amir Nizar Zuabi reminds us that animals are the early warning systems of nature. Birds flock before volcanic eruptions, herds run before earthquakes hit. But current warnings are not being heeded. It’s because, he says, the debates about climate breakdown are happening above our heads.

Cerebral arguments about data points and temperature are important for public policy of course, but for the change of heart that’s needed, not as effective as tears.

And tears are what I found myself shedding in the middle of the night in the park. The actors moving the life-sized puppets were themselves models of human sensitivity and cooperation with the animal world. Co-created movements, learned from the giraffe and baboon, re-created by teams of human beings intent on bringing their puppet elephants, deer, marmosets to life.

‘Ask the animals and they will teach you’ says the Book of Job in the Hebrew Scriptures. And what I learned from this herd was that the animals, in fleeing disaster, were warning the planet, warning me. Having made their way through hectic crowded Soho, their movements juddered and stalled, as their exhaustion in the city became more pronounced, even though they’d found some sort of relief amongst the dark and plants of the park.
The power of the project was in the creation of the real-time dynamic between the animals and humans. Those of us taking part were inevitably shining our torches into the eyes of the animals who retreated, shied away, made tracks into the trees. This encounter placed me as a human being as one who invades, exploits and exposes. Along with my fellow humans, I became someone to be feared and avoided: someone from whom the animals just wanted to hide.

The Herds are sweeping through the planet’s cities Kinshasa, Lagos, Marrakesh, Venice, Madrid, Paris, London in these months. And the day after tomorrow they arrive in Manchester.

….to say to us city dwellers – who are now the majority of human beings on the planet – that time is short for us to do what we have to do. As Scripture tells us; ask the animals, heed their warnings and fall back in love with nature itself.

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