Can ‘Banana Buffers’ Save California From Wildfires?
California’s deadly, damaging wildfires worsen by the year. The state’s naturally dry landscapes, parched by a changing climate, have turned into tinderboxes. A stray match or lightning strike has the capacity to incinerate forests, fields, and neighborhoods. Last year saw a summer and fall of choking smoke and blood-red skies over huge portions of the state.
To avoid fiery disaster, local governments often clear away dried brush from the hillsides and fields surrounding homes and streets. But one professor has a rather bananas idea: Barath Raghavan thinks growing groves of banana trees around towns and cities could help halt these now-yearly tragedies.
Raghavan, it has to be said, does not teach horticulture or a related subject. Instead, he’s a computer scientist at the University of Southern California. He’s worked on networks and systems for institutions as large as Google and as small as startups. But his other love is gardening. He’s a member of the California Rare Fruit Growers organization, and he currently grows 150 different edible plants in his yard, as well as the yards of his friends, family, extended family, and in any public patch of land he can find.
A decade ago, Raghavan combined his interests by researching how computing could make agriculture more sustainable. But he first hit on the idea of using banana trees as a firebreak two years ago, during an October fire whose name he doesn’t even remember, since they happen so constantly these days. (It was likely the devastating Kincade Fire.) After corresponding with Michael Kantar, an agricultural and plant breeding professor at University of Hawai’i at Manoa, Raghavan hashed out a theory: that banana forests in fire-vulnerable areas could serve as a green buffer against the flames.
