Do We Need Pandas? The Uncomfortable Truth About Biodiversity

  • Ken Thompson
Green Books: 2010. 160 pp. £9.95 9781900322867 | ISBN: 978-1-9003-2286-7

As biologist Ken Thompson explains in Do We Need Pandas?, conserving rare species does not really benefit people. If you care about nature because of its usefulness to humanity, pandas are a luxury item — and so are most other rare species. The money that is spent on saving them could be better applied by protecting ecosystems that provide us with food, timber, clean water, a liveable climate and flood protection.

If one's aim is to prevent extinctions, as in much of traditional conservation, then identifying and fussing over endangered species is the best way forward. If one sees the environment as a source of services, as Thompson does, the more sensible course is to “conserve the fabric of whole ecosystems, and let the rare species look after themselves”.

The reason, he explains, is partly because rare species are too sparse to significantly influence the functioning of an ecosystem. They are thus unlikely to be essential for the continued provision of ecosystem services.

Thompson traces conservation scientists' failed attempts to prove that biodiversity is inherently good for ecosystems. First, the results of these experiments — typically using small plots containing manipulated numbers of plants — were not what they were cracked up to be. Yes, more-diverse ecosystems were more productive on average. But this was not a result of their variety alone — it was because they were also more likely to include the most productive plant, monocultures of which could be even more productive. Second, experimenters defined productivity in terms of turning sunlight into biomass. Yet growth need not tally with value: in lakes, high productivity often means more algae and fewer fish.

We should focus on saving whole ecosystems that are useful for humanity.

Thompson proposes that we give up the goal of maximizing biodiversity. Instead, we should focus on saving whole ecosystems that are useful for humanity. In the process of conserving such areas, biodiversity will be protected anyway, as a sort of bonus prize.

But by putting the focus only on what nature can do for us, Thompson leaves open the possibility that ecosystems that do not deliver sufficient services might be thrown out, with all the biodiversity that they contain. He admits that society has benefited from the turning over of forests and wetlands to agriculture: “It is only because of such conversion that you and I have enough to eat.” But he does not support conversion of any of the remaining wild habitat. Others disagree: some economists might argue that a particular wild patch would provide better services to humanity as pasture or plantation. This is the peril of the ecosystem-services model. Hitch your wagon to it, and when conversion provides better services than protection, your biodiversity bonus is cancelled.

Despite his book's provocative title, Thompson does not claim that we don't need pandas. Like most ecosystem services enthusiasts, he is keen to have his economic pragmatism and his emotional love of nature too. Letting the panda go extinct would be “a profound failure for our stewardship of the natural world”, he feels. But he cannot have it both ways. If the ecosystems in which pandas live do not provide economically valuable services to humanity, then it is goodbye panda.