Animal SOS Animal: 2nd Edition (Revised)

By J. Octavio Pineda

In these poems, thirteen animal ambassadors take the floor and call on their main predator, the human being, for help. (Trilingual: English, Spanish, French). The book also includes a foreword and a short human biography of the author.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9789584973443

Book preview

ANIMAL SOS

Foreword

Literature is a great passion to me, but all that happens to our beautiful and battered planet is a great concern. For a long time, this worry has not allowed me to read and write as calmly and joyfully as I would wish to, like something caught in my throat, which I was able to express in the form of this compendium of seriously endangered species, this collection of animal poems.

Complete ecosystems are being deforested or degraded daily. Thousands of species of flora and fauna are being destroyed or trafficked for absurd purposes, the result of human frivolity and superstition. Plastics flood the oceans. Global warming produces increasingly extreme phenomena, to such a degree that the Arctic, for example, has become something sadder than a summer beach, among other very serious problems.

Despite this, the vast majority of people, so unaware that they seem anesthetized, continue behaving as if all this was occurring on another planet and not on this one, our only home. And though I have addressed all these challenges in journalistic articles and social media, including possible solutions and success stories, it has not been enough.

So, I decided to resort to a straight-forward language, a more powerful message, giving voice to some of those exotic species, some of those beautiful, cornered animals, that have been with us for thousands of years, even in our fantasies and our dreams, and are seeing their existence increasingly threatened.

Let these brief lines, originally written in three languages that I know well (looking forward to their translation into many others for the message to reach all corners of the planet), work as an SOS from those fantastic creatures that we have not appropriately valued and need all our urgent commitment and help, with mitigation and rescue actions, a more sustainable development, and more responsible production and consumption practices.

This reduced number of animal ambassadors is just a tiny representation of the great biodiversity that our planet houses and whose wealth we are squandering.

I am confident that these animal laments will be echoed and, above all, will move to immediate action, because time is running out ... not only for them, but for all of us.