I did something today that you should never do.  I went on youtube, searched for ‘pandas’ and read the users comments.  Skipping over the usual display of unabashed ignorance (“are they like going extinct and stuff?”) one comment in particular caught my eye.   The self-styled user “BambooSue” had commented “LOL LOL LOL! OMG, soooooooo cute, donate to pandas now! ”

Batshit insane though she clearly is, the comment reveals something deeply worrying.  The fact is that an inordinate proportion of conservation money goes to fur balls with eyes. So called “T-shirt species” are haemorrhaging funds from arguably more worthwhile but less popular conservation efforts. Such views are not popular with the likes of BambooSue. In fact when, last month, BBC Wildlife presenter Chris Packham recently called for pandas to be left to die out so that conservation money could be spent on other things, the public outcry (and Daily Mirror campaign) was so great he was forced to issue the following (slightly sarcastic) apology whilst hugging a toy panda “I don’t hate pandas. I love cuddly animals.”

Though Packham is wrong to suggest that pandas are “an evolutionary cul-de-sac” (recent evidence suggests that genetic diversity is strong enough for evolutionary adaptation) he has a point and the problem goes further than just pandas.  In the last published accounts of the World Wildlife Fund, more money was spent on giant panda conservation than towards the protection of an entire rainforest in West Papua and income from donations for rhinos and tigers was 12 times bigger than donations for the entire global marine ecosystem.

So if fluffiness and size of eyes is no justification for conservation, what is? Environmentalists over the years have chosen to highlight the human benefits; medicinal plants, carbon dioxide capture, natural disaster prevention, sustainable fishing, gene banks for growing better crops to name but a few.  Worthwhile and scientifically justified those these are, they are simply excuses to appeal to the selfish interests of humans.  For me the only true justification can be found in, not what species are, but what they mean.  The phenomenal beauty, complexity (and cruelty) the resulting perfection of 3.5 billion years of trial and error.  The fact that every individual organism alive today is here because every single one of its ancestors for millions of years has fought and tricked its way into reproducing.  Despite the millions of dead-ends that litter the graveyards of evolution, these are the ones that made it. For now anyway.

Tags: conservation, environmentality, panda, youtube

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 7th, 2009 at 16:46 and is filed under Comment, Environmentality columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.