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.
