Mike Berners-Lee's book - if the name sounds familiar it's because his brother is credited with inventing the Internet - aims to develop in readers an intuition for the carbon cost of things in general, but discussing the specific impacts of a hundred different things (e.g., an apple, a rose, a car crash, a baby, the World Cup, War). But the biggest mystery about the banana today is whether it will survive. A seedless fruit with a unique reproductive system, every banana is a genetic duplicate of the next, and therefore susceptible to the same blights. Today's yellow banana, the Cavendish, is increasingly threatened by such a blight -- and there's no cure in sight. This is an enjoyable book that tells us how much CO2 equivalent are we causing, and hence our effect on the climate, by doing what we do every day. Is it better to read a book or watch a few hours of Netflix? well it is up to you but at least you know the comparison now. What is interesting is that Berners-Lee has managed to make a sensitive topic like this nonjudgmental which is no easy feat. It is not meant to make you feel guilty (well unless you are on a flight every couple of weeks) but to give you the tools to make decisions whether you are a hard-core climate warrior that wants to diminish your carbon footprint or just casually wanting to know how bad are bananas (hint, not too bad, but asparagus imported out of season is a true crime). Meat (especially from ruminants like cows and sheep) and dairy have huge footprints due to the generation of methane. At the high end are events that individuals have very little influence over, such as the carbon emissions of a volcano or the effect of the soccer World Cup. Again, the focus here is perspective on what are the big things to worry about.

You may have heard that a vegetarian or vegan diet is better for the environment, but, in truth, what you eat is less important than where it comes from. A carbon footprint takes into consideration many harmful gases, and the average size varies around the world.

How about the notion that the banana was the fruit referred to in ancient texts about the Garden of Eden. The climate in the Fertile Crescent was not conducive to apples. And there is some softness in the translations of ancient writings. The forbidden fruit was called a fig, which is also what the banana was called. And really, doesn’t it seem a more fitting shape for the job? Which makes it all the more ironic that bananas are essentially asexual. They do not breed. The fruit we eat today came from cloned plants. Mass-consumption bananas has always come from plants that do not propagate themselves, but require man’s intervention. This is the kind of book that will either inspire me or drive me crazy (or inspire me to drive other people crazy). The good news is bananas are a pretty good deal from the perspective of carbon emissions. There's a lot that surprised me in this book (for instance, bananas are not only okay, they have a smaller footprint than carrots or ice cream or a red, red rose) and a lot that made me think. The author points out that much of what we do in the name of saving the planet is foolish- the frequent flyer executive who wrote in to ask if he should use paper towels or the hot air dryer in public restrooms got the eminently sensible answer that hand drying is so minor in comparison to the airplane trips, it's silly to even contemplate changing the one and not the other. I was less than enamored with Koeppel’s style, a combination of pedestrian prose and forced attempts at humor, often with a creepy confiding tone. There were some cutesy metaphors I could have done without, such as when he likens gene splicing to splicing together reels of film, producing “the best qualities of both: Rhett Butler played by Harrison Ford and Scarlet O’Hara with a cinnamon-bun hairstyle.”

How far the vegetables traveled is again important, as out-of-season vegetables can require a lot of energy to transport: 250 grams of locally grown asparagus will leave a 125-gram CO₂e footprint, but if it was airfreighted to London from Peru, that footprint expands to 3.5 kilograms. If you’re using paper products, the one thing you have to do is recycle them, which will keep the paper away from a landfill where it will rot and emit methane. It’s also best to buy recycled paper since the manufacturing of new paper takes about twice the energy of recycling, thereby doubling the paper’s carbon footprint.So you get the idea, lots of info about something most of us never gave, well, a fig about. It is a fun read and you will find yourself saying (or thinking, if you don’t want to make the person next to you on the subway slowly edge away) “I did not know that.” Given that there are existential threats abroad to the common banana, and that we are not yet ready with a cross-bred version that is resistant to those threats, we should probably do what we can to appreciate the banana before it…um…splits.

It’s hard to miss the news about climate change. Every day there seems to be a new story about melting polar ice, floods, endangered species and how we should expect more hurricanes and extreme weather. It’s up to us, as the citizens of Earth, to push our leaders into action and do our own part to reduce the harmful emissions that are ruining our planet. Because Panama disease was permanently making fallow so much of its existing holdings, the fruit companies had a continuous need for new land, according to John Soluri, author of Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States.” Wow. This is a Feb 2019 update: I just read an article that confirms that the banana is at great risk. I thought the author of this book was trying to give a dramatic spin to his work, but apparently it’s all very serious! Here is the article: https://amp.ft.com/content/74fb67b8-2... Dan Koeppel’s Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World has incredible detail on the history and science of the banana but has significant issues with fluidity and focus. A gripping biological detective story that uncovers the myth, mystery, and endangered fate of the world’s most humble fruitThese days, you don’t have to be an environmental scientist to have heard the term carbon footprint. It gets used a lot in discussions about global warming or climate change and refers to the amount of carbon dioxide (CO₂) that gets released during certain processes, whether by a corporation or just one person. You can also stop buying low-yield crop varieties, which are foods like cherry tomatoes and baby carrots that take a lot of energy for relatively little produce. This will shed another 3 percent. A lot of what I thought made a difference makes less of a difference than other things I never even thought about!