"No Smoking!"

Dear Fellow Earthlings,

"No Smoking." is now the rule rather than the exception in all countries -- but not for Earth as a whole. The Amazon basin is being torched. The very lungs of our ecosystem are being decimated by unabated fires, done in a quest for quick profits. Farmers, during the dry season, are setting huge sections of the Amazon rainforest ablaze.

All people and all nations must do everything in their power to stop this destruction of Earth's lungs.

Without lungs, people cannot stay alive. Similarly, without the oxygen-producing rain forests of Brazil --

functioning as lungs to Earth's ecosystem -- life on Earth will be hard-pressed to survive.

Here is what the fires are doing to my and other Earthsavers' attempts to stave off the end of

life as we know it on Earth:

EARTHSAVING: The increasing pollution levels, the devastation of Amazon life forms, the destruction of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon and their cultures and languages, the rising temperatures that result from the disappearance of the trees that store so much carbon (keeping it out of the atmosphere)... All of these factors are among those that are exacerbated by the fires now burning in Amazonia.

The African elephant: The already beleaguered African elephant, is suffering all the more due to the pollution blowing in from Brazil. The world's ecosystems are all connected by the flow of Earth's air currents and water currents!

FRIENDS OF EARTH: Leonardo Di Caprio's efforts, Greta Thunberg's efforts, Yao Ming's efforts, my efforts -- indeed the efforts of all "friends of Earth", of all Earthsavers -- are often being ignored, criticized, even censured. Especially tragic have been the efforts of such environmental martyrs as Berta Cáceres (murdered in 2016), Chico Mendes (1988), Shehla Massed (2011), and Hang Serei Odom (2012).

The FALKLAND ISLANDS: Located next to a hostile neighbor country, threatened by petroleum drilling, losing its beautiful landscape to unsightly wind turbines, unable to deal with a huge landfill not far from Stanley (the capital of the Falklands), and exposed to the damage brought by hordes of short term, selfie snapping tourists, the Falklands are beleaguered.

Live and Let Live! This concept becomes harder and harder to implement and follow as invasions of non-native peoples, plants, animals, and other organisms disrupt the relative stability of ecosystems that were heretofore relatively isolated.

The JINGLES. The JINGLES survive well in the face of language destruction. However, the overall ambiance in which Jinglers operate work takes its toll on the health, the financial condition of, and the attitudes of Jingles instructors and clients alike.

LANGUAGE MANAGEMENT. It is hard to manage languages now that mobile devices and the internet in general are blunting language differences by throwing all of them into the same mix. Linguistic diversity is disappearing rapidly.

SAVING LANGUAGES. It is difficult to save languages when the cutures, the lifestyles, and the people by whom they are spoken are either scattering to all corners of the world or simply disappearing...

SAVING SENECA. I do not like to write this: Indeed, it hurts, but in the face of globalization and of the disappearance of biodiversity, cultural diversity, and linguistic diversity, the prognosis is decidedly NOT good for the beautiful, the precious language of Cornplanter.

NEW TECHNOLOGIES. Not only does runaway technological diversity open many Pandora's boxes. It could indeed, if not held in check by failsafe controls, eventually "decide" to eliminate its human creators.

PERSONAL NOTES. What we have here is someone very concerned, very powerless, but seeking to find a bit of order in all of this chaos -- and hopefully to discover (or, perhaps, create) some some pathways toward solution of the many challenges confronting him and his fellow Earthlings - both human and non-human.

I do not intend to "fiddle as Earth burns".

Steve Walker

Earthsaver and Jingles Creator

EarthSaver

Steve Walker

"No Smoking!"