8 On Becoming a Massively Distributed Thing Hedgehogs, Plastics, and the Bearable Lightness of Becoming

A largely beloved and once common critter in nighttime gardens, hedgehogs are now a rare sight in many parts of the United Kingdom. Studies of road deaths of hedgehogs suggest that the British population of Erinaceous europaeus has declined from a mid-1950s estimate of more than 30 million to perhaps less than 1 million today (Wilson and Wembridge 2018). Cars, poisons, impermeable fencing, gardening preferences for deathly tidiness, and the reduction of habitat through industrialization of farming practices, urban concreting, and construction of new buildings and roads seem to be key elements in this multi-factorial decline. Hedgehogs or “hogs,” as they are fondly called by many hedgehog lovers in the United Kingdom, typically roam up to two kilometres a night in order to forage and find mates. Thus, a landscape can quickly become segmented for them beyond livability. Badgers might also play a part in this decline, though why they should be such a worry now, when the two species have long survived together, raises further questions about the extent and effect of habitat loss on badgers as well as hedgehogs (Warwick 2014).

Litter is a vital element of the decline of hedgehogs. Their physiology means that apparently innocuous rubbish can become deadly. An empty crisp packet can be enough to entrap a hedgehog fatally since its spikes can stick fast in these everyday foil pockets, stopping the hog from moving backward. In a famous case from Somerset town, Weston-Super-Mare, it took six people to extract a hedgehog from a crisp packet (SWNS Reporter 2012). Despite the charm of such tales of bumbling hogs and human eccentricities, hedgehogs do regularly suffer greatly and die from contact with rubbish. This is a matter to which rehabilitators—who often end up treating litter-wounded hogs—readily attest. Common rubbish-induced deaths involve suffocation, starvation, or strangulation in various forms of plastics, such as cups, bottles, nets, and six-pack rings. Becoming entangled in such rubbish can also cause the loss of limbs or the gradual wearing away of flesh, leading to the formation of open wounds that can cause death by fly strike. Even with first-hand knowledge of the danger of many plastic products for hogs, it can be difficult to extract oneself from the use of these flexible, everyday threats. Like roads and cars—other common hedgehog killers—plastics and other potentially harmful forms of rubbish are large parts of hedgehog-rehabilitation practices, with syringes, rubbish bags, and plastic packaging forming major parts of hog care. Even greater amounts of plastics enter the everyday lives of carers through the commercial plastic encasings of products from food to bedding to Christmas cards.

When it comes to hedgehogs, many people in Bristol have yet to see one. My street in St. Agnes, Bristol, was decidedly hedgehogless. Like many streets in the country, our rows of terraced houses sported paved front yards that offered little to nothing to support hogs and back gardens almost entirely closed in by hog-impenetrable concrete walls (Low and Heyden 2015).

One group of children who lived on the street had never seen a live hedgehog. From both Somali and Caribbean backgrounds, my young neighbours explained that they had learned about them in school and pointed out that all the cars and the lack of bushes and trees along our street meant that we probably would not have any hogs around. However, they still hoped that one day they might find a hedgehog in our neighbourhood. Indeed, before I met these children (or told any neighbours about my hedgehog project), I had heard some of them yelling excitedly “Hedgehog! Look, a hedgehog!” Elated that maybe there was an Erinaceous europaeus presence in the street, I ran straight downstairs from where I had been working in my two-storey terraced flat. However, by the time I reached the source of the hog-related excitement, the kids had realized that their hog was in fact my next-door neighbour’s bristly shoe cleaner. After discovering our shared interest in hogs, from time to time this little team of children left offerings of hedgehog nesting material at my front door and once even a plastic bottle hedgehog (figure 8.1). This plastic and wrapping-tape hog is likely to be the only hedgehog in St. Agnes unless we somehow find a way to become part of an hedgehog-welcoming infrastructural paradigm shift.

Thinking about one’s individual implications is tricky in light of the apparently minuscule role of our own actions in the overall trouble. This is the sort of global warming micro-total culpability that Timothy Morton (2016, 8) explains in terms of turning the ignition of your car and realizing, despite the tiny nature of your act, that you are part of a “massively distributed thing.” As Morton argues, in the scaling up of our car startings and coal shovellings to the billions, since they happen all over (and unequally) around the world, we come to see that we are directly responsible for global warming, albeit in such small ways. Similarly, in “The Unbearable Lightness of Green,” Greg Garrard (2013) riffs on novelist Milan Kundera’s consideration of the insignificance of individual lives in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984). Kundera considers Nietzsche’s notion of the “eternal return,” a concept that—among other things—potentially lends weight to one’s actions and existence through the promise or threat that one might return to relive such actions throughout eternity. Thus, considering the troubles of apparent insignificance and the need to find a way to give weight to one’s actions, Garrard (2013) wonders about the challenges of climate change, in which the massively distributed nature of the problem renders one’s actions simply too light to bear. Yet Garrard notes that this lightness is simultaneously overwhelming in that everything one does—“switching lights off, eating air-freighted green beans and accepting a pay rise”—becomes heavily weighted morally (185). Simultaneously, one’s every act matters, and none of one’s acts matter.

Despite the micronature of our individual guilt in such massively distributed problems, extracting ourselves from these systems of environmental degradation can be almost impossible. When it comes to hedgehogs, for example, the more you know, it seems, the more you come to realize just how hard it is to make safe urban spaces. To avoid using plastics, cans, crisp packets, rubber bands, not to eat anything that has involved the use of poisons, or to live without daily contact with roads and drains seems to be next to impossible, as much as we might wish not to be implicated in the demise of hogs.¹

Bristolian hedgehog rehabilitator Yvonne Cox is often asked to give informative talks to children in primary schools about what can be done to help the hogs. Several times now I have seen Yvonne’s engaging talk, which never fails to hold children spellbound as she explains the habits of hogs, what they need, and why they are struggling. At one point in the talk, using small soft toy hogs to demonstrate, Yvonne explains many of the ways that humans accidentally kill or harm hedgehogs (figure 8.2). Once two children grabbed each another’s arms, clinging to one another as Yvonne told the tales of how hedgehogs get stuck and stabbed and squashed. In each talk, she explains everything that needs to be done to one’s rubbish in order to make it hedgehog friendly. Yogurt containers need to be cut in half, as do crisp packets. Cans need to be washed and crushed so that hogs cannot get into them and get stuck. Drink cans are never okay since hedgehogs push their noses into them and get cut. And recycling or putting things into bins does not mean that hedgehogs will not find them—hedgehogs go to the dump and can clamber into recycling crates. In Bristol, they even get stuck in the netting used to cover such crates. Yvonne has been petitioning Bristol City Council on just this matter but, as yet, to no avail.

One day back at Yvonne’s house after we had finished just such a talk to primary school children, Yvonne was busy as ever with the work of rehabilitating poisoned, injured, and emaciated hogs. As usual, there were cages to clean out, medications to administer, releases to organize, funds to raise, and twice-daily feedings to oversee. And there was rubbish to process. As Yvonne and I carried her recycling bins out to the curb, she acknowledged sadly that, at times, she just cannot keep up with all the processing needed to make rubbish safe for hogs. Although, when she can, Yvonne still crushes cans and cuts chip packets and yogurt containers in half, she explained that it is just not possible to do all the processing in addition to looking after all the hedgehogs in her care as well as her business and family responsibilities. Sometimes something has to give. Together we took the recycling out, but rubbish remained on our minds. Musing on the amount of plastics pollution everywhere, not only injuring hedgehogs that get caught up in it but also getting into waterways and becoming part of all sorts of aquatic life (and death), Yvonne added, “I just wonder how they will ever survive.”

Systems geared to disposability are remarkably difficult to avoid. In a mode similar to the tendency of many hospitals to generate high levels of plastic waste (along with other pollutants), within hedgehog rehabilitation the prioritization of the immediate needs of suffering hogs leads to potential environmental harms for other hedgehogs. Although I was cognizant of these potential harms during my fieldwork as an assistant at several rehabilitation centres, the needs of the hedgehogs in front of me always called most strongly, and I would find myself throwing out syringes and plastic swabs and piling plastic bags full of the waste of caring into skips. In this way, hedgehog rehabilitation finds itself deeply and unintentionally tied to sustaining the infrastructures that harm hogs. Rehabilitation practices commonly make use of the cars that not only kill but also deliver supplies and transport needy hogs as well as the rubbish and chemicals that poison yet offer vital support for cleaning their cages. Industrial farming systems supply the commercial cat foods purchased for hogs, even while such modern farming has made many rural areas largely uninhabitable for hedgehogs (figure 8.3).

It can seem to be impossible to escape this cycle. Consumerist modes of taking action emphasize one’s ability to “choose” to opt out of purchasing such products. As noted in the introduction to this volume, even when one finds oneself able to choose not to support the proliferation of plastics, the hope that such choices will add up to something sufficient is slim. In my fieldwork, I regularly found myself humming Ani DiFranco’s “Your Next Bold Move,” drawn to the themes of inextricability from damage at the core of this song:

… The mighty multinationals

Have monopolized the oxygen

So it’s as easy as breathing

For us all to participate

Yes they’re buying and selling off shares of air

And you know it’s all around you but it’s hard to point and say “there”

So you just sit on your hands

And quietly contemplate

Your next bold move.

Not participating in the use of plastics does feel like a long-term holding of breath. There are occasional tales, however, of people who live without—or with greatly reduced—amounts of plastic. A housemate whom I lived with in the Blue Mountains of Australia told me a story of a woman who lived somewhere in the mountains who would tie any plastic that she used onto her belt. She had pledged to continue wearing such plastic for the rest of her life or as long as the plastic lasted. By living with such a physical reminder of the persistence of plastics, she intended to sustain her motivation to avoid them. Although I never saw her, this woman apparently still lives in the mountains, and her belt is not yet full. When I was living in New Zealand, the story of a woman called Merren Tait—who went a year without using plastic—was highlighted in several newspapers as part of the Plastic Free July campaign. Tait cited her lack of children as a helpful factor in this difficult achievement and warned that it was not practical for everyone, noting that people thinking about shifting to plastic-free living should “prepare to be inconvenienced” (cited in Tiddy 2016, para. 20). The default flows of many of our lives mean that it takes extreme consideration and commitment—as well as resources of time and energy—to avoid the use of plastics as individual consumers. The demands of caring and budgeting raise the question of the extent to which avoiding plastics is ever a simple matter of choice (Shotwell 2016).

Despite the impossibility of individual decisions adding up to the sorts of change that hedgehogs need, British hedgehog conservation campaigns have largely targeted individuals, encouraging volunteers (sometimes referred to as “champions”) to negotiate with neighbours to put hog-friendly holes in fences, to avoid the use of poisons, to be careful with bonfires and whipper snippers, and to minimize rubbish. Capturing something of this approach, the British Hedgehog Preservation Society (BHPS) has stated that “small individual actions can have a huge impact when there are many people involved” (cited in Coles 2015, para. 11). Here, in line with the sorts of ABC, or “actions, beliefs, choices” models common to neoliberal modes of conservation, individuals are encouraged to choose environmentally-friendly products and actions (Shove 2010). Such approaches neglect the infrastructural, technological, regulatory, habitual, and meaning-based aspects of societal transformation (Elzen, Geels, and Green 2004). Such ABC thinking is in accord with what Nikolas Rose (1996) defines as the ideal neoliberal citizen: the skilled, (ostensibly) self-reliant, individual chooser-consumer. This emphasis on individual choice and freedom, however, makes hedgehogs’ need for humans to connect their gardens en masse and for city-wide (or even nation-wide) avoidance of harmful waste seem to be almost impossible. In relying on consumption-based approaches, individuals are left hoping that their choices add up to something more for hedgehogs than just a scattering of isolated, inaccessible, would-be havens.

During interviews, many hedgehog champions privately acknowledged feelings of sadness about the ultimate usefulness of their actions. Despite upbeat public proclamations of the possibilities of conservation, participants often expressed a sense of hopelessness, seeing that their individual actions in the face of massively distributed things—whether plastics or roads or the lack of permeable fencing—were not sufficient to make the changes needed. Given the vastness of these problems, however, the issue is not necessarily that the actions are individually small—it is that they are lonely. Yet, though many hedgehog champions are well aware that individual actions are not enough and that a collective response (and responsibility) are needed, in the current conservation paradigm there is little means to create them. Speaking of hedgehog conservation more generally, hedgehog ecologist and author Hugh Warwick (Interview, 2014) saw larger social systems as the fundamental cause of hedgehog decline. In an interview, he commented that, in his “more depressed, melancholy state,” he saw that “we’re just tinkering with the problem because we can’t deal with the real issue, and maybe it’s that we keep tinkering long enough that we keep things from going down, but it’s unlikely.” A similar sense of disheartened sadness emerged in interviews with hedgehog champions from a range of political backgrounds who noted that they couldn’t see what could be done in response to pervasive development, greed, and the “disposable” lifestyles of many people in the United Kingdom.

The sorts of dismay and sadness experienced by champions are given little public space. There is a political impact of these omissions: recognizing sadness is potentially recognizing that the strategy of individualistic hedgehog conservation is not doing all that is needed. As Sarah Ahmed (2010, 246) notes, rather than leading to despair, or inaction, the sadness of recognizing the hopelessness of the path that one is on might mean instead being “prepared to be undone.” In this, unlike the regime-strengthening nature of compulsory optimism (Ehrenreich 2010), sadness and other “negative” emotions might be key for changing direction. Several clinical psychological tests have suggested that “with sadness comes accuracy” (Storbeck and Clore 2005). For example, people who have become sad from being exposed to sad films or music tend to become more detail oriented and make fewer mistakes in recall (Bonanno 2009). People with low moods also put greater time and effort into tasks (Melton 1995) and are more resistant to stereotypes of others than people who report feeling either angry or happy (Storbeck and Clore 2005). Indeed, clinical studies have suggested that sadness leads to increased creativity in problem-solving strategies (Gerrards-Hesse, Spies, and Hesse 1994). George Bonanno (2009, 31) argues that, in its purest form, sadness “is essentially about resignation” and that, as painful and vulnerable as sadness might be, it has a vital role to play in helping us to pay attention to our lives as it “turns our attention inward so that we can take stock and adjust.”

Morton (2012) argues for the importance of such sadness—a mood that he sees in ecological awareness. He argues that, in addressing our current ecological situation, we must move from the guilt of recognizing how we are implicated to the sadness of greater acceptance of the ecological realities in which we find ourselves. He frames sadness as the psychic space in which we need to be in to accept the great troubles facing our planet without sliding into denial and self-protection, blame, shame, or guilt. It is the sense of impossible responsibility and of the depth of our interconnection. In hedgehog conservation efforts, though such sadness does not offer a direct solution, it does hold the painful truth of both desire for coexistence with hedgehogs and awareness of our role in making the world unlivable for them.

Perhaps curiously, other aspects of sadness might point toward—and even help to encourage—the sorts of greater connectivity and responsiveness that such situations need. Sadness suggests where our cares and desires lie, reminding us that meaning lies in connectivity. As Judith Butler (2014, 22) argues, it is in the loss of others—be they beings, places, or things—and the mourning of them that “something about who we are is revealed.” As Butler notes, through experiencing the loss of another as a loss of part of ourselves, we come to see that we are composed of our attachments to others, that we are our relationalities. Sadness can also be helpful in countering the isolation in which we find ourselves. Per Stoknes (2015, 176) argues that more than personal sadness might help to forge community among those touched by it and that such pain can “open the heart to reach out to all things still living.” Sadness tends to draw others to us, eliciting their caring responses (Riker 1991). In this way, the powerful pull of another’s sadness can feel at times almost manipulative—or, at least, inconvenient—particularly when we wish to maintain fictions of individualism.

Although sadness potentially signals a necessary change in direction and might steer people toward connectivity, this is not to say that sadness is enough. Despite the many hedgehog champions who have expressed such sadness, little else has happened. In feeling and tending to sadness, we may recognise ourselves as implicated and interdependent, but then what? Response in the face of the realities of connectivity is not as simple as deciding to act boldly and singularly. Morton (2009) points out that the imperative to “act now” overlooks the impossibly interconnected realities of the problems that we face. We cannot, as the individualistic hero-actors whom we are encouraged to be, make what needs to happen actually happen (Lee 2013; Summers-Effler 2010). So what is a hedgehog champion to do?

Despite emphasizing interconnection, something remains curiously individualistic about Morton’s (2012) notion of the sadness of ecological coexistence. His figure of ecological awareness, the noir detective, see themselves as implicated: that is, as both the detective and the criminal. As Morton notes, “the particular kind of guilt with which ecological awareness is associated strongly resembles the realization at the heart of a noir detective story: the detective himself is the guilty party” (16). He suggests that those of us who feel such guilt might sink into shame and then into sadness. My research with hedgehog conservationists has convinced me of the potential power of sadness—as opposed to guilt or blame or shame—to allow one to face the negative ecological realities of our entangled impacts on the world around us. It is, I argue, also necessary that we recognize our radical connectivity as also entangling us in the maintenance of lives and in possible responses to harm. Yet this potential can be hard to see. Just as our particular contribution to the massively distributed forces that we would rather not be part of is micro-total, with our individual actions seeming to be impossibly both light and heavy, so too is our potential “positive” participation in diffuse and multi-agential forms of power. We need to attend to the multiple ways in which we already are and might become active together in aid of the worlds we wish to be a part of.

Some distributed actions include the sorts of intentional campaigns on which much environmental activism is based. Yet such collective actions can also be based on quiet, everyday actions. One small anti-plastics success in the world of British hedgehog conservation was based on remarkably non-spectacular yet effective collective action. The McFlurry—a sweet frozen dessert—comes in a plastic cup with a fitted lid. A regular McFlurry lid has a wide opening to accommodate a large spoon, and the size of the opening is just right to trap the head of a hedgehog (BHPS 2006). This new form of plastic litter, it turned out, was unfortunately a perfect hedgehog trap. Smelling the sweet leftovers in discarded McFlurry containers, hogs would squeeze their heads through the lids only to find that, because of their spikes, they could not pull their heads back out of the hole. Such hogs often died of dehydration. The BHPS quietly mobilized. The organization’s newsletter and supporting websites sent out instructions to the 12,000-strong group: they were to write letters to McDonald’s en masse, complaining politely without foul language, threats, or sarcasm (Lean 2006). The campaign was not particularly speedy: letter writers worked for five years. However, finally in 2006, McDonald’s relented, invested an undisclosed sum in design tests, and soon released the new McFlurry container, designed with a reduced hole in the lid, which meant that the majority of hedgehogs would not be able to push their heads into the cup.

Such a victory is by no stretch spectacular: all this letter writing resulted in a small change to the lid of a disposable ice cream container. Furthermore, that change has not been perfect. The cups are still plastic, and presumably many are still thrown into landfills. Small hogs still get caught in the cups: the new McFlurry lid needs to have a hole big enough for a spoon, which means that, even with the smallest hole possible, the gap is still big enough for baby hedgehogs to get stuck. However, many hogs have been saved by this quiet mobilization of BHPS members. It also offers new ways of thinking about power and effectiveness. In what Geoffrey Lean (2006), environment writer for the Independent, called “one of the most genteel campaigns in conservation history,” a small but life-saving change emerged from this mass letter-writing campaign.

In this, we find a massively distributed thing playing out in a different way. In joining with others, in finding oneself within distributed agencies, one’s actions are part of an immense contribution even while, individually, seeming to have been too small to be helpful. Within such activism, the action of one person is almost impossibly light: which letter or call to McDonald’s over those five years finally led the company to change its packaging? Such agency is not heroic in the sense that any individual is the agent of change. Rather, it is the power of being one of many ants, working separately but together to make a remarkable thing, the magic of being part of a massively distributed thing.

As Elizabeth Lee (2013) notes, the actors in activist work are radically more than human. In this instance, there are felled trees for paper and envelopes, sunlight and soil and water and roads and working humans connecting all of them, phone lines and pens of metals and plastics and maintenance crews, BHPS offices and newsletters, and supportive grandchildren and the foods that maintain bodies and their ability to feel affection for hedgehogs and a culture inculcating a high degree of respect for particular forms of politeness. There are also forces and actors and vital accidents of which we might not be aware. Although one person alone cannot will such collective happenings, one can find oneself acting as part of the energies of actors that add up to something. Returning to DiFranco (2001), it is indeed hard to point and say “there,” but that does not mean that one needs to sit on one’s hands: rather, one might find oneself part of a radically bold move if one can take part in the collective work of collaborating within what Alexis Shotwell (2016) refers to as distributed ethicality.

Not all roles in distributed mobilizations are micro, of course. The letter writing campaign rested on a huge amount of work carried out over many years to create the infrastructures to support the community of humans and hogs who come together as the BHPS. The society was set up in 1982 to encourage respect for hedgehogs, to support research on and education about them and their needs, as well as to offer support and guidance to hog rehabilitators. In the years since then, this potential has been maintained through the work of volunteers and employees who tend to the mailing lists, fundraising, interpersonal matters, and the planning of events needed to keep people feeling a sense—and reality—of togetherness. While it might seem obvious that the BHPS campaign couldn’t have happened without the existence of the BHPS—it is the creation of such collectives that holds the potential for action. Yet, despite forming an indispensable hub of action, for anyone who has been at the apparent helm of organizing an action, there is the immense frustration of realizing that you are not in control in an easy way. Although huge amounts of individual time and effort are invested in creating the potential for such mobilizations, one ultimately finds oneself acting in concert with many other forces rather than directing them. Even as the apparent ‘organiser’—being part of such actions still has the curious feeling of being only part of a massively distributed thing.

Other campaigns that have made helpful—if small—shifts for the lived realities of hedgehogs have also tended to be strategies aimed at building and working with larger collectives. Again, these do not necessarily look like typical activist mobilisations. One such example is a woman living in a small Somerset village whose educational hedgehog-themed neighbourhood coffee and cake parties raised money for Prickle’s Hedgehog Rescue; during such afternoons, she was also doing the transformative work of both connecting neighbours and educating them about the needs of hedgehogs. Such work quietly changes the configuration of a neighbourhood as neighbours are pulled in and mobilized. Recently, Hedgehog Street has also begun working directly with developers, and it is exciting to see what might emerge from such relationships. In targeting infrastructural barriers and pollutants, it is vital to look at the power that might be available in wide multi-species assemblages of stories and hogs and meaning and policy and the materialities of connection and communication.

How multiple forces come together successfully (and successfully for whom), however, is difficult to chart. As Jane Bennett (2010, 34) notes, the question of precisely what agency is—whether human or otherwise—is deeply mysterious. It is also hard, Bennett suggests, to know precisely how events come about, for stories of change are often told backward, from the events to the potentials that allowed for them, a mode of storytelling that can allow the teller to emphasise her or his most favoured explanations. Who exactly the agents are—and whether we will ever fully know—are also in question. Yet a range of affective, human, and infrastructural “conditions” allowing for mobilization can be identified (Ahmed 2010; Lee 2013). In particular, the McFlurry campaign was well suited to the tendency of many British people to love hedgehogs and, in particular, to frame them as gentle and somewhat quaintly eccentric. Such imagery is also at play in enabling successful neighbourhood-activating tea parties. Here, in place of the typical translation of “assemblage,” returning to the French original of agencement, referring not just to a collective of things but also to an arrangement that creates a particular agency, is potentially helpful (Müller 2015, 28). This was not merely a collective but also a collaboration of tendencies and materialities that, in this right mood and moment, allowed for a small shift that matters.

Seeing that we are inherently implicated—for apparent good or ill—destroys fantasies that we might be able to extract ourselves from what is emerging around us. In seeing ourselves as connected—for better or worse—we reject the possibility of purity. Such ideologies of purity of looking after one’s own backyard are ultimately, Shotwell (2016, 9) argues, “a decollectivizing, de-mobilizing, paradoxical politics of despair.” Acting within implication—indeed the only way that we can act (or be)—we find ourselves necessarily compromised and making compromises. There are few guarantees. However, in seeing such connection, we might also see everyday potentials. How might one connect and with whom? Which infrastructures, organizations, collectives, or teachings might end up mattering? It is hard to tell, and it is surely a matter of experimentation, of connecting with others and seeing what happens. There is the necessity, however, of connecting with other agents in order to create new potentials for action. “We”—and who we are becoming—are never separate from such co-constitution. As opposed to Kundera’s use of Nietzsche’s eternal return to lament the insignificance of being, when one shifts outside of an individualistic frame, a new possibility of significance emerges. In attending to the desires and realities of connection, Rosi Braidotti (2006, 191) celebrates “the bearable lightness of becoming.” In this, she argues, the challenge of the ethical is to transform negative passions into positive passions “through encounters and minglings with other bodies, entities, beings and forces” (163). It is faithfulness to this “desire to become” with others that guides such connections (163). In this, we become aware that we ourselves are always part of, and actively creating, massively distributed things.

Becoming is always a case of becoming with another: atomistic individualism is a fantasy. Such connections, creations of new instances of agencement, of mobilizations and possible becomings, also have implications for the sad loneliness of our times, marked as they are by the experience of a lack of meaningful connection. Such loneliness overlooks the reality that we are always in connection, always working in concert with others.² The vital question, however, is with which forces and actors are we connected? Many people do not belong to intentional care-oriented organizations such as the BHPS. However, we are always participating in massively distributed collaborations. Thus, rather than a question of individualism versus collectivism, the vital matter is to attend to which collectivities we are a part of: with which others we are joining and how? Many of the collaborations that currently create our lives connect us with infrastructures and technologies that support the proliferation of plastics but not of hedgehog-connected gardens. We might have relationships with neighbours, for example, that tend to emphasize “polite” distance. Such modes of relating can make it awkward to begin a conversation about how to knock a hole in a fence so that hedgehogs can get through. Yet such modes of relating might shift through a good neighbourly tea party. Shifts in our relationalities, by forming bicycle collectives, engaging in campaigns for carless streets, lobbying local councils and governments for hedgehog-friendly building design or on banning plastic bags, for example, all offer possible reconfigurations of relationships that could have benefits for hogs. All such collaborations, however, also mean subtle changes in ourselves as we become-together in new relationships with others. There are never any guarantees of course—with which actants (human? other than human animals? architectures? forces unknown?) might we come to work with and to what ends? And, indeed, as with our implication in greater harms, it might not feel like we are ever doing much. Yet our becomings might well be bearably—even joyfully—light. What might we become through actively—though never with full control—recognizing and attending to our participation in massively distributed things?

1. 1. Although the sorts of human-made motorway crossing structures first implemented in the Netherlands are increasingly being built to assist critters in crossing British motorways, such “green bridges” are not currently being implemented in British cities (Natural England 2015).
2. 2. Indeed, much of the conclusion of this chapter emerged from the thoughtful critique of the editors of this volume, who pointed out that I was imagining the archetypal neoliberal consumer as actually isolated. This is the sort of generous collaboration that can help us all to escape from the confines of imagined individualism and its many lonely, insanity-creating effects. It is also a reminder of the strangeness of authorship within paradigms of fantastical sole authorship. I find myself thinking of the provocative observation from Astrida Neimanis (2017, 9) that “no one ever thinks alone, and that gratitude is worth deliberately, even meticulously, cultivating.”

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