Who cares about the Panda?

If the pandas were to disappear from the earth, that would actually not be a big deal. If our grandchildren won't be able to see any tigers or bald eagles, so what? And to be honest, when was your life last disrupted because of the lack of dodo birds?

Plenty of species go extinct all the time. That is the way it has always been since the beginning of life on earth. If one species more or less goes extinct today does not matter.

What is more disturbing is that the number of species that disappear is increasing. A lot. There is something called a "background rate" of extinction, which is the natural rate of extinction, when nothing particular happens, like an asteroid hitting the earth or so. Current estimates give that we currently are at least 50 times above the background rate. And the earth may within a few decades reach 10000 times the background rate. This would mean that we currently are entering an era of mass extinction comparable to the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Ours is a time of record breakers.

There is much more information about this available on the net including a very simple graph.