Picture the scene. It’s 350BC, 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 percent 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 20 million 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.
“We mess with these interactions at our peril, for they’re so immensely complex we do not understand them,” Carew warns.
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.”
Taiwan can often feel woefully behind on global trends, from fashion to food, and influences can sometimes feel like the last on the metaphorical bandwagon. In the West, suddenly every burger is being smashed and honey has become “hot” and we’re all drinking orange wine. But it took a good while for a smash burger in Taipei to come across my radar. For the uninitiated, a smash burger is, well, a normal burger patty but smashed flat. Originally, I didn’t understand. Surely the best part of a burger is the thick patty with all the juiciness of the beef, the
The ultimate goal of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is the total and overwhelming domination of everything within the sphere of what it considers China and deems as theirs. All decision-making by the CCP must be understood through that lens. Any decision made is to entrench — or ideally expand that power. They are fiercely hostile to anything that weakens or compromises their control of “China.” By design, they will stop at nothing to ensure that there is no distinction between the CCP and the Chinese nation, people, culture, civilization, religion, economy, property, military or government — they are all subsidiary
Nov.10 to Nov.16 As he moved a large stone that had fallen from a truck near his field, 65-year-old Lin Yuan (林淵) felt a sudden urge. He fetched his tools and began to carve. The recently retired farmer had been feeling restless after a lifetime of hard labor in Yuchi Township (魚池), Nantou County. His first piece, Stone Fairy Maiden (石仙姑), completed in 1977, was reportedly a representation of his late wife. This version of how Lin began his late-life art career is recorded in Nantou County historian Teng Hsiang-yang’s (鄧相揚) 2009 biography of him. His expressive work eventually caught the attention
This year’s Miss Universe in Thailand has been marred by ugly drama, with allegations of an insult to a beauty queen’s intellect, a walkout by pageant contestants and a tearful tantrum by the host. More than 120 women from across the world have gathered in Thailand, vying to be crowned Miss Universe in a contest considered one of the “big four” of global beauty pageants. But the runup has been dominated by the off-stage antics of the coiffed contestants and their Thai hosts, escalating into a feminist firestorm drawing the attention of Mexico’s president. On Tuesday, Mexican delegate Fatima Bosch staged a
RSS