Chris Packham, you’re wrong about pandas

TV naturalist Chris Packham finds his own credibility at risk of extinction over his comments on panda bears. He argues we should let them become extinct because “extinction is natural”. Saying people care about pandas only because they’re fluffy, and he’s right, most but not all people do, he goes on to tell us that the Yangtze river dolphin “vanished because it was pig-ugly and swam around in a river where no one saw it”. No. It died out for a number of reasons, such as human predation, accidental killing, and because the Yangtze river is notoriously and massively polluted with toxins as dangerous to man as other animals. The lack of aesthetic appeal had nothing to do with it.

Had the creature looked like an aquatic teddy bear, that in itself would have done nothing to prevent the damage to its habitat caused by heavy industry.

Packham seems to be arguing that because we’ve fucked up so massively, so comprehensively, and because most people don’t care, and few actually get involved, that we who do care and do get involved should only seek to preserve little islands of plants and animals, little pockets, and let the rest of the world go to Hell. It’s pessimistic more than it is practical, because he knows as well as any intelligent person that the web of life is global: all the evidence suggests when you strip out (or, for that matter, relocate) one plant or creature it can have consequences that spread out like ripples on a pond. Conservation efforts must be both local and global. Our eyes and focus must be on the small and big pictures.

I’m not suggesting that the loss of the panda will result in runaway bamboo plants taking over the planet, of course not—but if we allow the panda to become extinct based on Packham’s reasoning, where do we draw the line the next time, after he’s already redrawn it? He describes the panda as an “evolutionary cul-de-sac”, and if that’s so, then what exactly are we, and who are we to continue playing God when the fact that we’ve always done so leads us, perhaps inexorably, towards the very real possibility of our own self-engineered extermination?

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