Granted the other problems we face here and around the globe, it seems a reasonable question. To answer "Because they’re sooo adorable!" makes it difficult to preserve species that don’t captivate us and puts the small and slimy and ugly at the end of a long list that gets longer everyday, a list of threatened plants and animals.
           
To understand why it is profoundly important to keep species thriving in the natural world is to understand how the natural world works, the world that makes our life on this planet possible.

First of all, species have been going extinct since species began. It is part of the “nature of things.” What is troubling, however, is the recent rapid rate of extinction. Although the source you consult to determine the speed of acceleration will offer differing but still alarming numbers, some facts are not up for debate. The most sobering fact is that the rate of extinction in the past 100 years is unparalleled in all our history, and, there is a direct connection to human activity.
           
When species get to the point of being endangered, something has happened to upset the balance that has provided for the plant or animal to succeed. Again, in some cases it is just the natural world’s way of balancing itself. But in almost all cases these days, it is the result of human interactions, which include logging, fishing, farming or development.

 Endangered really means that a habitat has been degraded, has reached a point where its future and all the various life forms it supports are in grave danger of dying, of vanishing, and despite our ability to work scientific miracles, vanishing forever. As an example, the food the Giant Panda eats needs the shelter of the forest to grow. Remove the forest, and the bamboo will die off and then the Panda will be gone forever. In this particular instance, the illegal activities of poachers and hunters may also be adding to the declining number of Giant Pandas.
           
Healthy ecosystems are based on one principle: diversity promotes stability. The concept of interdependence allows the web of life although fragile, to also be unusually tough. The next time you see the extraordinary design of a spider’s web, imagine little bits of it being removed, and then more bits and soon there is a short single gossamer strand, isolated and weak, blowing away, never to return. Lynn Caporale, a pharmaceutical researcher puts it in another context. “The loss of biological diversity is the loss of a giant library that contains answers to questions that we haven’t learned how to ask.”
           
To protect our ecosystems is to protect the species that live within them. That includes seemingly insignificant species like minnows or grubs or wonderful looking species like Giant Pandas, or the species that has been able to split the atom, send people to the moon, break the genetic code.
           
Surely that last species will have the sense to realize that in saving the Panda we are saving more than an animal in a remote part of the world; that we are helping to preserve and nurture a myriad of life forms both large and small that live in the forest where the bamboo lives, and the Panda, if we’re as smart as we seem to be, will continue to live, too.