Picture the scene. It’s 350BCE, and Aristotle – presumably looking a bit like Sir David Attenborough, except in a toga – is collecting creatures from the teeming rock pools around the Greek island of Lesbos. He’s beavering away on his scala naturae – a “natural ladder” that puts everything in the natural world in a hierarchy that has animate things such as minerals at the bottom, then plants above them, followed by animals. And of course, at the top of the ladder, tottering maniacally over everything else: humans.
Beastly is Keggie Carew’s messy but heartfelt account of the environmental catastrophe unleashed by this barmily Trumpian idea of Aristotle’s that we’re somehow superior to the rest of nature. As Carew convincingly argues, the influential scala naturae “paved the philosophical way – nature was to serve us”.
Over 380 or so charmingly meandering pages, Carew attempts to unpick Aristotle’s folly and fix “humanity’s big error – our interactions with the planet’s other inhabitants”. She does this in part by recounting the story of our intellectual journey – from ancient Greece to today – as philosophers, theologians and scientists first built on, then started to break away from, Aristotle’s worldview.
Carew, author of the Costa book award-winning memoir Dadland (2016), does a great job of rattling through centuries of dusty theological thought and the way the likes of Saint Augustine and Thomas Aquinas fatefully concluded that animals don’t have souls so aren’t worthy of our care, or even our pity. As she observes, pithily: “Advocacy for kindness to fellow creatures under the Abrahamic god has never really caught on.”
But over the past 20 years or so, scientific research has started to chip away at this human-centric view. In 2012, scientists from around the world signed the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, announcing that “the weight of evidence” shows “all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses” are conscious beings – a revolutionary moment, because it proves that animals aren’t “dumb beasts” that we can use and abuse, but feel pain and other emotions. Carew, though, isn’t especially wowed by this scientific sea change: “The extraordinary thing is that it took so long. More extraordinary still, perhaps, is that it needed to be stated at all.”
Alongside this potted history of our philosophical understanding of nature, Carew describes, in myriad moving ways, the colossal environmental damage caused by our wrong-headedness. From the destruction of wild habitats (only 2.9% of land on Earth is “faunally intact” – the rest tarnished or ruined) to biodiversity loss everywhere, the book is brimming with examples of irrevocable harm. “Wherever we showed up,” notes Carew, darkly, “extinctions followed.” She writes poignantly about the suffering of the beautiful baiji, the Chinese river dolphin that was gradually overwhelmed by pollution, noise and over-fishing: “The baiji took more than 20m years of evolution to refine, and 50 years of grand communist-capitalist ideology to rub out.”
The book’s structure is confusing at times, jumping between Carew’s personal memories, facts about one species or another and wide-ranging summaries of human history. Then again, maybe she is trying to mimic Charles Darwin’s famous “tangled bank” metaphor for how everything in nature is connected. Indeed, Carew is especially compelling when it comes to this interrelatedness, where the dying out of one species can cause entire ecosystems to decline and fall.
Sea otters, for instance, were wiped out on America’s coasts, which meant that the urchins they ate multiplied unchecked, which in turn caused entire kelp forests to fail – killing off their inhabitants, including the gentle 10-tonne Steller’s sea cow. The disappearance of one creature can spell doom on a much larger scale. As Carew warns us: “We mess with these interactions at our peril, for they’re so immensely complex we do not understand them.”
In place of Aristotle’s egocentric ladder, Beastly is a clarion call for the humbler notion that every bit of nature matters: “Our banners must shout more expansively: Save the whale! Save the krill! Save the phytoplankton! Save everything in between!” Time and again, Carew comes back to the psychological impact that losing wild places is having on us – sometimes called “solastalgia”: the sadness we feel as we wander through landscapes unnaturally devoid of insects, birds and animals.
For Carew, as for many of us, this melancholy has given way to something darker: “A close cousin of solastalgia is eco-furiosity, an eco-tear-your-hair-out solastalgia on steroids. It is the long loud, desperate cry of the human heart.” The only hope for our battered planet is that we come to appreciate the wondrous interconnectedness of living things. As Carew wistfully puts it: “When we understand, we begin to care.”
• Beastly: A New History of Animals and Us by Keggie Carew is published by Canongate (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
