Earth Day 2023 is no time to celebrate.

Dear Fellow Earthlings,

Today is the 54th Earth Day. The first observance of Earth Day was held on April 22, 1970....

I wish it weren't true... BUT WITH EACH PASSING EARTH DAY, Earth's ecosystem continues to be increasingly imperiled by human beings' misuse and abuse of Earth's treasures.

All along, humans have realized that we should not squander our resources lest we suffer as a result.

Ancient Europeans began to realize that it was possible to kill not only a single Irish elk -- but all of them. This fact surely would have become obvious when hunters of those magnificent creatures suddenly found it harder and harder to hunt them BECAUSE NO MORE IRISH ELK WERE TO BE SEEN in places where they had

once lived in great numbers.

19th century Americans noted how the seemingly limitless numbers of passenger pigeons darkening America's skies were becoming scarcer with each passing year--- leading to people's pathetic final farewell to "Martha" -- the last passenger pigeon -- when she passed away at the Cincinnati Zoo on September 1, 1914.

Japanese people cope with high Japan cedar pollen counts, with many of them not realizing that once the diversity of Japan's mountain forests had been destroyed by human activity, the last stands of cedars began making a "last stand" -- in the form of inordinately high pollen production as a strategy to survive human decimation of native tracts...

As a "survivor", the Japanese cedar holds off its human destroyers -- but at the expense of other trees. These other trees have not evolved in such a way as to mimic the cedar's "pollen showers" -- and thus cannot put themselves into any sort of survival mode as the Japanese cedar has done. This ability to co-exist with humans puts the Japanese cedar into the "extinction resistant organism" category along with such life forms as crows, rats, cats, dogs, bullfrogs, quagga mussels, Burmese pythons -- and corona viruses...

Native elms of North America have almost disappeared due to Duch elm disease, brought to the Americas by Europeans. There are still other types of elms around, but that is like saying "Mammoths are not extinct, for there are other types of elephants still extant..

The last speaker of Yaghan (See Installment 131.) passed away in 2022 at the age of 93. Although the Yaghan genome lives on, its phonome does not.... The Yaghan culture can now be added to the Tasmanian culture and the huge number of countless other cultures that have been lost along with their languages. Diversity is disappearing even as talk of "diversity" increases.

Speaking a contrived, haphazardly created ethnocentric "native language" will do nothing but further divide people. In unity there is strength, in diversity there is promise, but in the dismantling of the former at the expense of the latter (or vice-versa), there is confusion.

On this Earth Day, celebration is not appropriate. Seeking solutions through the balance called for to resolve the plusses and minuses of diversity as opposed to homogeneity is what should come out of this day!

Steve Walker

Earthsaver and Jingles Creator

© 2013 Steve Walker, The Jingles-The Japan Foundation for English Pronunciation, Summit Enterprises.