Vigil in New York City

Washington Square Park Arch honors the first President of the United States, who was innaugurated in 1789 at Federal Hall on Wall Street. "The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty," George Washington announced on April 30 in his innaugural address, "and the destiny of the Republican model of Government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people." As much as it must be so, Washington realized what a risk this was. As poet Archibald MacLeish would put it almost 150 years later--people's "liberty was land." Because people are dependent upon soils, waters, plants, animals, and air collectively for thriving lives, liberty is possible only to the extent that the Earth can maintain its own health. George Washington wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1795 of the "baneful effects" of many Americans' land use trends. "But it is so natural for man to wish to be the absolute lord and master of what he holds in occupancy," he wrote to W. Strictland in 1797, "that his true interest is often made to yield to a false ambition." Indeed, on December 11 we will stand together to acknowledge that we are part of a time in history when the consequences of our false ambitions writ large have restricted not only our own liberty, but the liberty of the Earth and all those who inhabit it. Tonight we will stand together to urge a renewal of hope and action toward resurrecting the possibility of true liberty for the future as George Washington and so many early Americans dreamed.