Chalquist – Katrina and Rita: A Terrapsychological Read

No sooner did New Orleans begin to dry out from Hurricane Katrina than Rita came barreling down on a strip of coast already devastated by the first of what scientists believe will be a long procession of unusually powerful storms raging around the globe, their energies fed by the warming seas.

"Barreling" is the operative word: the first storm having dented an already faltering petroleum supply, the second is aimed straight for another complex of key production facilities.

From the perspective of terrapsychology, the study of the presence, reactivity, or "soul" of the land, the industrial-sized belief that such incidents occur at random is untenable. There is too much symbolic significance, too much obvious meaning, behind such earthly movements--movements which every aboriginal culture understood to be expressions of a spirit or soul of place. A more contemporary, more psychological way of stating this is that psyche is not a brain secretion peculiar only to humans, but a dimension of being, a kind of inner lining to the world. Philosophers refer to this as panpsychism.

The terrapsychological question behind our inquiries is this: if we suspend our materialist notion of a deanimated world long enough to wonder if Earth is reacting in step with our doings upon her wounded surface, what sorts of meaningful patterns emerge?

The global warming that feeds such powerful storms results from our largely unchecked burning of hydrocarbons sucked from the depths. Carbon dioxide set loose in the atmosphere reflects heat radiating from our planet back to its surface: the Greenhouse Effect. As a result, temperatures rise in increments no longer open to honest debate. The facts force us at last to face up to it beyond the confines of denial: Earth is being overheated by our irresponsible use of petroleum products.

Viewed in a terrapsychological light, superstorms aimed directly at refineries located in one Gulf while the United States fights a war for oil in another Gulf look less like ironic random occurrences than an attempt at self-protection. With worldwide petroleum supplies already at peak, the damage done to the American habit of believing them unlimited is devastating. It is as though Earth were staging an assault on our most ecologically destructive national addiction, one of long-standing profit to the pushers who now hold onto the highest political offices as a direct result of their depredations.

In an animated, reactive Earth, what is commonly--and from the economic standpoint, conveniently--taken for happenstance assumes the significance of intent: not thought-out intent to be sure, nor restricted to the automatic systemics of the Gaia Hypothesis, but purposive nevertheless in its clumsy pursuit of ecological integrity. The washing of eight dolphins from the Oceanarium at Gulfport into the Mississippi Sound returned them to the watery wilds from which they were removed against the requirements of their nature and evolution. Oddly enough, they had been placed in the dolphin pool that had withstood Hurricane Camille in 1969. It did not stand up to Katrina.

Let's be careful not to fall into the trap of seeing such earthly attempts at self-protection as revenge or punishment. It is, after all, a hallmark of zealotry to blame the victims. The thousands of casualties fleeing and dying in the Gulf states are not targets of retribution, earthly or heavenly, for they have done nothing to deserve what has happened to them. Caught in the path of Earth's groping, blind, instinctive self-rebalancings, they are the tragic casualties of a war against nature which humans, who spring from nature and depend upon it for every last breath, can never hope to win. (The dolphins partook of this dismal fate: raised in captivity, they lack the capacity to survive on their own in the sea.)

At this point, with ecosystems burning around the overheating world, the best we can hope for is a truce, starting with the realization that a sustainable, petroleum-free existence is no longer an option, but a necessity if we are to survive as a species and thereby avoid the evolutionary cul-de-sacs that hold the bones of so many previous hominids.

Earth, our home, our origin, our creator, is raising her voice. How will we choose to respond? From the wallet, from the seatbelt, or from the heart?

by Craig Chalquist (Tears of Llorona)