A butterfly as a bellwether in Arunachal Pradesh’s fight against climate change

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Editor's note: I want to start this newsletter with an episode from Calvin and Hobbes, one of my all-time favourite comic strips. Calvin, as fans would know, is the mischievous sort. One day, he traps a butterfly in a glass jar. “Look,” he tells Hobbes, all excited, “I caught a butterfly.” Hobbes isn’t impressed. “If people could put rainbows in zoos, they’d do it,” he says. Calvin considers it. Then he sets the butterfly free. A similar crisis of conscience probably prevailed in the minds of Indian policymakers in 1972. The Wildlife (Protection) Act they enacted that year identified vulnerable species from India’s animal kingdom and made laws to protect them. This included butterflies; the Act also outlawed their hunting. The Act helped bring back many species from the brink of extinction. Tigers, lions and saltwater crocodiles, to name a few, are thriving in Indian forests and seas. But its impact on butterflies isn’t quite quantifiable. A butterfly lives for a month at most, so its census is more about spotting and counting. More importantly, to save a butterfly, you need to …