Book review: Do we need pandas?

Do we need pandas?

Ken Thompson / Green Books / Paperback £9.95 / ISBN: 978-1-900322-86-7

The strapline for this excellent book is: “The uncomfortable truth about biodiversity”. Uncomfortable, because it suggests that humans should perhaps be more concerned with saving things that we tend to regard as ugly, but which we depend on for survival, such as bacteria, rather than specific species such as pandas.

Not that the author, Ken Thompson, is suggesting that such animals should not be the focus of conservation efforts, rather that declining numbers of pandas is the symptom of a much deeper crisis that needs tackling: halting the depletion of the ecosystem’s services that are crucial for the continued survival of every living creature, including pandas.