Once the panda's range extended clear into Burma. Now, in zoos, a panda tends to lie as limp as a throw rug over the artificial landscaping that has been provided, splotched black and white as if with finger painting or costumed for Halloween or clowning. Yet the cut of the mouth is stoic, not toylike, and the light-and-shadow coloring conveys the ambiguity of being neither white nor black but both, like sunshine falling through a forest—a camouflage therefore reverberant of grief, since the forests are mostly gone.

Jiuzhaigou's sinuous lakes and popping waterfalls may be preserved like the imperial tokens of forgotten dynasties in Beijing's Forbidden City, mined for tourism instead of export—a sliver of habitat for golden snub-nosed monkeys, hog badgers, musk deer, lynx, civets, the littler red species of panda, and rhesus macaques. I wouldn't suggest that Native Americans or their wildlands endured a kinder transition, but China's industrialization has been extraordinarily compressed. With 2,000-plus nominal nature reserves—each provincially managed because no national park service yet exists—the country is keeping its wildest scenery eclipsed but unblitzed. Yet the avalanche-sculpted waterways of Jiuzhaigou are being reinforced at their dam ends and are easily reached from the Blue Sky parking lot near Mirror Cliff.

Solitude is almost a vestigial pleasure, now that electronic entertainment can accompany us anywhere. Yet, if not from God, aren't we borrowing our planet from our children, as the saying goes, and if so, shouldn't we deliver it to them in habitable shape? Neither Marxism nor Buddhism would dispute that contention, except for the changing concept of what to think of as habitable. If we consider ourselves not just preeminent among but preemptive of any other form of life­—if people simply do not care, apart from culinary calculations, when few unfarmed fish are left, or roadless ridgelines without windmills pinwheeling on them, or snowfields or meadowlarks—then the few who do care and who wish to relax from the pell-mell continuum may have to obtain surround-sound film clips of Ansel Adams–type wilderness imagery for their wall-scale computer screens. Video virtualizations corresponding to white noise may outsell these because, in fact, we're getting to prefer virtualizing so fast. But queues of citizens will still be trundled in, as at Jiuzhaigou, to tread the boardwalks and purchase tchotchkes from costumed hawkers at the end of the bus route. The harlequin pattern of crib and playroom pandas, like tiger camouflage, is with us to stay. Jungle-striped but captive-bred, the cats remain as de rigueur for zoos as pandas are going to be after the trees are gone, much like the replicated Tibetan monasteries with correct facades and paint schemes but no monks living inside.