The Abolition 2000 Annual Meeting took place on Saturday, May 2, during the Non-Proliferation Treaty Conference. It was opened with a moving welcome and greeting sent from the Lenape Center with a call for a new cycle of consciousness to protect Mother Earth. The Lenape were the indigenous First People in Manhattan who welcomed the Dutch settlers to New York City, which was initially explored by Europeans when Henry Hudson sailed up the river named after him in 1609.
A statement from Lenape Center:
Welcome to the Land of the Lenape, Lenapehoking.
Mother Earth has provided for us everything we need to experience life since the beginning of time.
This generosity has been abused by the addiction of profit, and her body deemed a commodity. We have prostituted our life-giving Mother to our greed; our vicious lust for profit has caused great injury to her body, a body that sustains us. Climate change is the symptom, global warming is her fever and the disease is greed.
Had we kept a relationship of honor and respect with the Earth, we would not be in this climate change predicament, nor would we be here today to speak of peace and disarmament.
The root cause of climate change, the weapons race, nuclear proliferation, and the military industrial complex are one: Humans have lost their natural calibration to the life-giving cycles of our planet. Heart, consciousness, compassion, balance, have ceased to be spun into life, and into renewal: Humans no longer feel an obligation to honor Earth’s true role as the life-giver and respectfully follow her natural cycles. The overwhelming obligation is now profit, at all costs.
Welcome to Lenapehoking and into a call for a new cycle of consciousness.
