Illustration: Peter C. Espina/GT

Children, I hope you enjoyed feeding the pandas and cleaning their cages here at the panda rescue center in Sichuan Province. Some of us have bought panda hats to take home to our families, and we have all posted selfies with pandas on social media.

I'd like us to take a moment and think about how we got here. Before this, we toured a Tibetan area, where some of us said the people were poor and backward. Some of us even said the villagers would be better off if they had wealthy, big city lives like ourselves.

Please note the village we visited had wild animals, fresh air, good soil and clean water.

The city we live in, however, is covered in a toxic haze. We fear the food we eat is tainted. We must boil our water before we drink it, and even that won't remove all of its contaminants.

In order to grow the wealthy city in which we live, we expand our urban areas relentlessly. This is why, when we go for a walk around our city, there are no wild animals left. When we buy a fresh fish from a farmer's guesthouse, it comes from a small pond he created. The rivers are too toxic for fishing.

To employ the people in our city, we build factories that belch toxins into the air, water and soil. Because the outdoors have become so ugly, we have severed ourselves, scuttling from schools and workplaces to our homes like cockroaches seeking the shelter of food cabinets on a concrete floor.

In time, all the living things around our cities will have died out. This includes uglier creatures, like insects and frogs. No one cares about them, even though their passing signals a crisis in the natural balance.

I fear the lesson we have learned from taking care of the pandas today is not that we are destroying our habitat and poisoning ourselves, but that pandas are cute, and we are heroic for saving them. I hope that, instead, we reflect on how our lifestyles have led directly to the near demise of tens of thousands of other creatures.

Let's consider the tragedy of these magnificent pandas listlessly pacing in concrete enclosures, who are so hopeless they have lost the urge to mate, rather than gape in awe at how wondrous we are to help them artificially reproduce.

This center does not exist to help pandas, but to make money. We have paid 200 yuan ($32.52) for the privilege of getting close to these animals. Pandas are rented to foreign zoos for millions of dollars a year, where they generate even more money in ticket sales. These pandas are not part of any significant preservation effort, but a way for some people to enrich their lives.

I ask all of us to consider that while those villagers may be poor in terms of material possessions, what kind of intellectual, spiritual and environmental poverty are we in that we can visit this panda base and not see how the decisions we make every day have directly led to this tragic situation. A situation that, if we're not careful, will keep repeating itself until all that is left are our poisoned cities and attitudes.

This article was published on the Global Times Metropolitan section Two Cents page, a space for reader submissions, including opinion, humor and satire. The ideas expressed are those of the author alone, and do not represent the position of the Global Times.