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The ancient Minoans, whose civilization was the last of the Great Goddess cultures, believed that a giant bull lived beneath the sea. When Crete and the other islands and coastal regions of their Mediterranean homeland experienced destructive earthquakes, volcanoes or storms, it was a sign to the Minoans that they had fallen out of balance with nature and cosmos. The storms resulted when the bull beneath the sea kicked and raged in order to demand that the human community return to and restore balance.
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit the Gulf Coast 3,500 years after Minoan civilization disappeared. In his belated address to the American people in Katrina's aftermath, George Bush called the hurricane "a cruel and wasteful storm." He characterized survivors as people "looking for meaning in a tragedy that appears so blind and random." Citing the Chicago fire, San Francisco earthquake, and dustbowl of the Depression era, he declared, "every time the people of this land have come back from fire, flood and storm to build anew, and to build better than we had before." He promised to spare no expense in this rebuilding. And he summarized a core western belief: "Americans have never left our destiny to the whims of nature and we will not start now."
The ancient Minoan and modern American philosophies represent sharp contrasts in the human interpretation of nature and our proper relationship to it. And the pain, displacement, suffering and loss caused by Katrina force us to look again at our place in nature.
New Orleans, America's busiest port city, is built on a difficult, unstable and infested terrain that is below sea level and has been reclaimed by the ocean innumerable times in earth history. Early explorers claimed its site was inhospitable and uninhabitable for human habitation. The capital of Minoan civilization had a busy but small port to serve it that was built on the northern coast of Crete the site of modern day Iraklion. The great city of Knossos was built three miles inland from its port.
These simple facts demonstrate both spiritual and practical differences between ancient, earth-based philosophies and our modern world view. People who know the sea and the weather, the fickleness and mutability of the planet and of mortal life, intimately know all the elements - earth, air, fire, water. Each is necessary to our survival and can be our friend. Each contains potent forces that, when imbalanced through disrespect or misuse, or through imposed, artificial or unnatural controls attempting to bend it to our will, can erupt and cause serious disturbances in our individual bodies and minds, our cultures and environment. People who know and respect the sea and the earth would not build great and populous cities or locate the majority of their fuel refineries on volatile coastlines and would not oppose human destinies to the whims of nature. Rather, people with earth wisdom and holistic awareness would preserve and protect their coastlines, and work with rather than in opposition to "the whims of nature" for the sake of the earth and its creatures' health and well-being.
Traditional earth-based civilizations knew that we had to study the forces of nature, utterly respect them, shape our personal and collective lives to be in harmony with them, and correct our lives when we fell out of harmony. Plato taught that the key to healing was to bring friendship and reconciliation back to those internal and external elements that fell into opposition and conflict.
In the earth-based view, nature is just nature, doing what nature does. The sea sometimes erupts, the earth sometimes quakes. We cannot know when or where, and any of us may be caught in its throes, demonstrating to us life's precious fragility. Though nature may treat individuals as expendable or strike us in arbitrary fashion, nature's grand patterns and inner laws are not cruel, wasteful, random or whimsical. They only look that way to our anthropocentric view that values our oceanfront restaurants, amusement parks, high rise condos and summer homes more highly than the health of our water, dunes, marshes, and wildlife.
Holistic medicine for people cannot be separated from the health of the planet. As the ecological medicine movement argues, not only individuals and not only human beings, but the entire earth must be our patient. As the Precautionary Principle, championed by Carolyn Raffensperger, argues, we must "first do no harm" not only to individuals but to our entire planet. As holistic medicine teaches, all living systems, whether of the individual or the planet, are breathing, communicating, and interactive wholes. Neither body nor mind, neither soul nor society nor ecosystem are whimsical or random. When we oppose the great forces, of which we are only a humble part, with our wills and desires, when we set our destinies against nature rather than unfold them in harmony with it, we will imbalance the earth and the great bull will kick and the earth strike back. It will strike not because it cruelly wishes to harm us, but because it is imbalanced and seeks redress.
We do not know if, whether, or how much Katrina, Rita and the other severe storms of our era are due to global warming or natural cycles. But we do know that we are severely interrupting the natural cycles and that the body of our mother earth is poisoned, disturbed and out of harmony. And we do know that, unlike the Minoans, we design and build cities and destinies in arrogant opposition to nature rather than in harmony with her.
We must grieve and mercifully tend the great loss and suffering caused by the hurricanes. But we should be humbled by them as we are humbled by the suffering through illnesses and deaths of patients, friends, loved ones. To oppose nature, in individual or collective lives, is to guarantee that we will be stricken again and our suffering will increase many-fold.
Rebuild New Orleans. Restore homes, lives, hope. But not in the old way that opposes nature. Rather, accept and grieve that the New Orleans we knew and loved is gone. And learn our lessons in life's most difficult classrooms. Minoan civilization was eventually destroyed when the great volcano on Santorini spewed forth what was perhaps the largest such explosion in human history. All we build will eventually fall. But the New Orleans we know and love was destroyed less than three hundred years after its founding while Minoan civilization lasted two thousand.
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