The Great Oriental Eggfly – Hypolimnas bolina jacinta
Hypolimnas bolina is a common butterfly, found across the world (Australasia, Indo-Malay) in woody areas; not surprisingly, they are all over India as well – July to December are best for sighting these bright little garden treats. They belong to the same brush-footed species of butterflies, like the Monarch.
The specimen featured here is a male – with two large white spots with a hint of iridescent blue/violet. Flying low or gliding, or honey-sucking or resting on a leaf – they are a treat to watch. Intensely territorial (specially the males) they can be seen chasing away other species of b-flies. The females with brownish wings and small white spots on its fringes, take great care to ensure that she lays eggs on a plant that doesn’t have ants!
The male great eggfly is so territorial, that they may even fly closer to / charge at larger mammals and even humans – all this in a lifespan of 24 days. Favourite host plants include creeping foxglove (Asystasia gangetica).
Bolina, in Greek mythology was a nymph that falls in love with Apollo, but dies of drowning when she leaves him… whereas the origins of hypolimnas is unknown. The species was identified and described in 1738 by Linnaeus.
There is enough food for everyone, but not everyone has enough food.
The world produces food to feed twice the current population; ironically, food waste causes billions of people to remain hungry and are malnourished. On average, about one-third of food produced globally is lost or wasted (UN-FAO). Every year on October 16, about 150 countries celebrate the World Food Day to mark founding of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations in 1945, that’s that.
The second most populous country and second largest producer of food in the world – India – is home to 1/3rd of world’s hungry. By 2050, the population of India is estimated to reach 1.63 billion, overtaking the population of China. 34.5 % of the population is urban (471,828,295 people in 2019). The numbers are huge and therein lies a definite issue – the increasing need to scale up production, burgeoning consumption, waste, inequalities, hunger, and diminishing resources, destroyed natural habitats, geographical spread…
Food waste and loss amount to a reckless misspend of resources such as water, land, energy, labour and capital. UN estimates that 40 percent of the food produced (67 million metric tonnes) is either lost or wasted; 1.3 metric giga-tonnes of edible food is wasted worldwide per year. This food wastage however, isn’t limited to one level alone but perforates through every stage; from harvesting, processing, packaging, and transporting to the end stage of consumption. Global food wastage accounts for 6.7% of greenhouse gas emissions.
The problem is, significant amount of food wastage occurs because of gaps in the logistics supply-chain (50% lesser cold storages in the nation to store fresh farm produce), and also due to excesses in consumption and unhindered disposal – which end-up in landfills or composted. GoI informed Parliament that over 11,889 tons of foodgrains were rotten at various centers of the Food Corporation of India FCI) in 2016-17. The estimated cost of this wastage is ~Rs 1 lakh crore.
34 out of 1,000 children born in the country die in the mother’s womb itself. 9 million children below the age of five die much before they can comprehend the meaning of independent India and ~200 million of our population sleep hungry on any given night. 3,000 children die of mal-nutrition everyday. But the problem is not just the food that’s wasted when leftovers go in the trash. It’s also all of the greenhouse gas emissions, water, biodiversity loss and soil & air pollution that was generated to create that food only for it to be tossed away unconsumed.
Wet-waste, kitchen waste, can be composted; but that wasn’t the purpose to cook food, right? Few statistics to put the waste problem into perspective:
25% of fresh water used to produce food; equals to enough drinking water to 10 crore Indians p.a.
300 million barrels of oil used to prepare cooked food.
20% of all grocery and related purchases go into the waste
21 million tonnes of wheat, 40% of fruits and vegetables, 30% of cereals go unused every year
40% of cooked food (leftovers/excess cooked and plate-waste dumped into waste-bins
15% of India’s population is under-nourished
58% of all kids under 5 yrs are anaemic
38% of kids under 5 yrs have stunted growth, which is 3% of global kid population
21% of kids under 5 yrs are underweight and wasted (low weight to height ratio, debilitating muscle and fat tissue and hence a child is ‘wasted’)
51% of women in the age-group of 15-49 are anaemic, resulting in 20% children born underweight
20 crore Indians sleep hungry every day, of them, ~7,000 die of hunger
830 million Indians survive on less than Rs. 20 per day
Hunger kills more people each year than AIDS, malaria and terrorism combined
51 births occur each minute, 27 million per year.
16.6 million added to the population per year.
24 million children in the country are orphans, of which only 0.3% do not have both parents.
A team of 10 professors from the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS), Bangalore, surveyed 75 of Bangalore’s wedding halls over six months; they recorded a wastage a whopping 943 tonnes of good quality food, enough to feed 2.6 crore people a regular Indian meal.
Feeding a Nation
Access to food is a challenge that GoI is tackling at its own pace. National Food Security Act (NFSA), 2013 provides for coverage of upto 75% of the rural population and upto 50% of the urban population, thus covering about two-third of the population of the country for receiving foodgrains @ of Rs. 3, 2 & 1 per Kg for rice, wheat & coarse grains respectively under TPDS.
The Indian Government on its part is fast-tracking enhancement of storage facilities across India to safeguard foodgrains.
Improving the PDS system to ensure that ~90% of Indian families in both urban and rural areas can have access to procuring essentials.
Contemporary research has confirmed the crucial importance of nutrition in the first 1,000 days of a child’s life. The nutrition provided in the period between conception and the child’s second birthday is critical for its optimum cognitive and physical development. Breastfed infants are more likely to have better physical and mental health, well into adulthood. ICDS or Integrated Child Development Services is setup to tackle the malnutrition malaise.
India’s mid-day meal scheme is the world’s largest Govt sponsored mass feeding program, with a budgetary allocation of 11,000 crores during 2019-20. This scheme covers 9.12 crore children of 11.35 lakh schools, 8.45 lakh kitchens, employing 25.95 lakh people from marginalized communities. This is aside to private organisations at various states covering ~50 lakh children.
The PM, sensing the problems of scale, had expressed concern about the population explosion, in his Independence Day speech of 2019; he even said – that those who follow policy of small family contributes to the development of the nation.
Minimizing edible food waste: Did you know – by segregating, recycling and composting, a family of 4 can reduce their waste generation from 1,000kgs to less than 100 kg every year? Now, multiply this statistics with 1.3 billion population and imagine the result! Adopt a zero-waste-lifestyle – Buy less, cook as much is required, take lesser portions than you think you can eat and refill plate if necessary later. If you are left with cooked food, that isn’t stale, or anticipate excess leftovers at your event, please do seek out areas where underprivileged people live and share it with them; do not leave it to the caterer or event manager to ‘manage’ the waste. If you know of a hotel where food waste is an issue, connect them to an organisation who willingly takes away the edible food and distribute to the needy. a short list of organisations is below, and there could be many more local heroes who do this out of passion.
That trees feel and express is being realised, world over. That nature speaks, in its own language, is also a fact, least acknowledged.
I have experienced, time and again, visions and voices, murmurs and groans, smiles and laughter, and sighs of despair. As you walk along, as you say hello to friends, acquaintances, strangers, and to the nature around; you would be surprised that, nature, actually, talks back! The connect wasn’t just with nature I lived with for decades, sometimes you just stroll in a park, a forest or a manicured landscaped garden, and hear voices, vibrations that can be comprehended in peace.
Voices? Vibrations? …some might just think of a learned shrink’s advise.
Trees grow all over the place, breaking pavements and walls, damaging roads, breaking into homes and just destroying; the same species growing elsewhere grow accommodating things around them, hardly raising a brick, perfectly in peace with its surroundings; while one lives happily even surrounded by concrete, a neighbour in a lush garden just wilts, dies.
Friendly neighbours
What makes them to behave (yes behave) differently? Remember kids? how they grow to be rowdy or statesmanly or just a normal everyday person? Commonly we know, its about the climate, environment, ground, soil, manure, water, insects, bees, butterflies, and all that; its also about training, care and most importantly, love. If you care enough, a dead tree comes alive, or a happy tree can simply wither away. They also teach us – about growth, positivity, efficiency, resource management, co-habitation, adapting to change, handling dangers, face in the sun and tiding over seasons, and absolute Life in general.
As I was gathering my thoughts and putting pen to paper (colloquially…), I came across this post, that surmised all that and much more. Reproduced here with permission from Cordele Glass the author, is an article from positivepsychologynews.com
WHAT TREES CAN TEACH US ABOUT DEVELOPMENT
People rarely acknowledge the fact that trees are living beings that eat, reproduce, and react to their environment. Trees have been around for over 390,000,000 years and all of that time has imbued them with an irrefutable wisdom regarding how to live life. The differences between humans and trees are vast, but that does not imply that every bit of a tree’s wisdom can be disregarded as irrelevant. Below are some lessons I’ve gleaned about life and development from some of the wisest teachers I know.
Sometimes Change is a Good Thing
Deciduous trees lose their leaves when they decide the environment calls for a different approach to life and their way of being. This is the change many people associate with red and yellow autumn leaves. It happens gradually yet fully; without hesitation, uncertainty, or regret. They rely on a combination of genetic and environmental factors to help them know when the time for change is right.
Turning leaves
Living with the knowledge that change is an inevitable and vital aspect of our development is what helps us to continue advancing in ways that guide our bodies and our surroundings toward harmony. Many developmental psychologists take a lifespan view of development. This lifespan perspective is supported by work in neuroscience with concepts like plasticity suggesting that neural and psychological change continues to take place long after adulthood has begun. Neuroscientist Michael Merzenich has a Ted Talk explaining some of the basic tenets of neural plasticity. Impermanence or perpetual change is also a foundational idea in Buddhist psychology and various other Vedantic teachings tied to acceptance, peace, and spiritual development.
As We Grow, We Transcend and Include
Dendrochronology is the scientific study of trees and how they develop over time. As they grow, each layer continues to contribute to the whole life and being of the tree. The older, smaller parts add to the fullness of the individual tree, and yet there is more that makes up the tree as it continues to interact with the environment, changing over time. The new rings do not reject, diminish, judge, or demean the older parts of the tree. Instead, they include them, they surround them, and they work in harmony to contribute to the whole tree’s life.
Transcend and include
As our consciousness develops we begin to take wider and wider perspectives. We begin in infancy by only considering our immediate needs of food and warmth, emotional and physical safety. As we learn and our perspectives grow we begin to consider the needs of others including our parents and our closest friends. Through adolescence, wider social circles become more important to our values, actions, and interests. As social and emotional development continues we begin to include communities, cultures, and nations into our considerations and priorities. Generally speaking, humans tend to move from egocentric to ethnocentric to world-centric as we transcend, yet include, each stage of growing up. Each subsequent stage fully includes the prior stage.
This theory of transcending and including stages of consciousness is known as Spiral Dynamics. It was first put forth by Dr. Clare Graves (a contemporary of Abraham Maslow) and later popularized by the work of Don Beck, Christopher Cowan, and Ken Wilbur. Spiral Dynamics synthesizes the gamut of psychology’s best developmental theories into a model of holarchical stages that stretch across the human lifespan and the human species itself. In philosophy, a holon is something that is simultaneously a whole and a part.
Some Parts of Life Need Energy and Some Parts Don’t
Living tree, some dead branches
As trees grow older, taller, and wiser they often reallocate their resources to leaves and branches that contribute the most to their life, and away from the branches and leaves that are no longer catching light. The unused branches and leaves eventually wither and fall off the tree as the higher branches and leaves flourish and continue to contribute to the tree’s development.
We live in the same world as trees, and in this world, there is a limited amount of energy we can use at one time. Putting this energy into the parts of our lives that help us to thrive and develop is vital to an engaging and meaningful life. Since energy is limited, reallocating energy toward these things may mean that other parts of life, whether they be friends, family, jobs, hobbies, or environments, may have to wither and occasionally be removed all together. Dr. Bonnie Benard calls this process Adaptive Distancing and lauds it as a significant contributor to the development of resilience in children and adolescents. This shedding, reorienting, or diminishing is in service of putting the most energy possible into the friends, family, jobs, hobbies, or environments that contribute the most to our lives.
Being Open to as Much Light as Possible Leads to the Most Growth
Trees try to maximize the surface area of their leaves because they need light to grow. Sometimes they use massive individual leaves like the Bigleaf Maple Tree, sometimes they go for quantity like the needles of a Conifer Tree, and sometimes they reach high above the competition like the Coastal Redwoods.
Growing toward the light
Many trees grow their branches toward more concentrated areas of light and some plants even move with the sun as it travels across the sky, a process called heliotropic sun-tracking. They know how important light is, and they try their best to openly receive as much as possible.
Finding light in our own human lives is just as vital to our growth. For us, it may come from the kind words of a new friend, the passion felt from an inspiring action in others, or the comfort felt from connecting with our bodies. It may be the awe of a mountain view, the thrill of a favorite sport, or the touch of a loved one. The field of Positive Psychology has dedicated itself to researching these aspects of human psychological light with the above examples supported by hundreds of rigorous studies from around the world. Barbara Fredrickson has demonstrated that our psychological resources can broaden and build with the light of positive emotions. Deci and Ryan have posited that the light of relatedness is a psychological necessity, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has investigated thoroughly how the light of flow states helps to grow our psychological complexity. We too can approach life by being as open and receptive as possible to the things that give us light that helps us grow.
Summary
Trees let go of flowers…
Trees can teach us to embrace change. They can also teach us that with change we needn’t discard aspects of our past, but rather we can keep them and use them to stay strong as we transcend our current states. Attending to the things we need for growth and being as open to our needs as possible can set us up for continued success. We can act in ways that allow people, feelings, and experiences to fill us up and contribute to life and development of well-being. We can do this without trying to hold onto them forever and without expecting them to be a certain way. Just like trees.
Wise | OtherWise 