Posted on: September 29th, 2009 by Roger Lawson

So I read in the Guardian that Chris Packham thinks we should leave the giant panda to die out. Fighting talk and, thankfully, the fight is taken up by Mark Wright of WWF (or ‘the WWF’ as The Guardian puts it, maybe to differentiate it from the wrestlers?). Good on you Mark.

Chris argues that we should concentrate our scarce resources elsewhere; that in evolutionary terms the panda has had its day and that if it wasn’t so fluffy we’d just let it go towards its inevitable demise. If we put the money that we spend saving the panda into saving a rainforest or the Kalahari we would have some much more impact.

He’s probably right, in one sense. But that way of thinking isn’t for me.

We are privileged to work in a passionate world, full of passionate people. And our job is to inspire more people to feel passionately about the issues that we already do. And that’s where the panda comes in. It’s not the most intelligent animal, it has a diet with almost zero nutrition (and even then only takes 10% of that nutrition out of it before depositing almost undigested bamboo) and you could give it a candle lit dinner, roses and oysters but it still won’t breed.

But crucially, it’s cute. It’s fluffy and it has those rather odd black eye patches. It’s instantly recognisable.

And that’s why it’s so important. Its fluffiness is inspiring a whole new generation of people to be inspired by the natural world and to care about conserving it. The fact that it is endangered merely adds to the argument that something needs to be done, and now!

So keep fighting Mark. We need everyone to feel passionate about saving our natural world. The spreadsheet of cost versus benefit might say that we can have more bang for our £ elsewhere, but it doesn’t measure the value of creating passion. And that’s what will change the world.

One Response to “The giant panda”

1. reuben says:

   September 29, 2009 at 8:50 pm

   I had a particularly memorable conversation with an expert at WWF once who pointed out that, in survival terms, it was the bugs and grasses we needed to look after in order to preserve life on earth. But all anyone gets vexed about are pandas and tigers.

   I guess the point is, you need to protect the grasses that the tiger’s prey eats to protect the tiger. It’s not an either/or. It’s a both/and.