Genetics and evolution have played a central role in the history of this province as well.  In fact, you could say that this tiny, narrow coastal province of  Atlántida has played the most profound role in the history of modern Honduras, because Atlántida is the heart of Honduras' banana growing history.

The banana comes from the far east, but the invention of the global fruit industry took place in Central America, with much of the action centered on Atlántida.  Train tracks were laid throughout the region, rainforests were razed, and cities sprung up, all to support the very real challenge of moving fruits that rot out of the jungle and into the cities of North America and Europe.

Throughout Central America, banana barons played puppeteer with governments and lives.  Genocides, overthrows of Democratic governments, invasions of countries. 

Like corn, commercial bananas have evolved to require human intervention to exist – they have no seeds.  They are just clones - commercial bananas are a worldwide monoculture.  And like the Mayans five hundred years ago, a simple disease could devastate our worldwide population.  Just a single disease, and all the bananas will vanish.  The threat is not theoretical.  Disease has just been discovered in our world's commercial bananas – and it is spreading quickly through Asian and African countries.  That is the risk of monoculture; it can crush economies and ruin lives.

This fascinating story of the banana, which to this day is playing out on the coasts of Honduras, intensified when, in 1998, Hurricane Mitch devastated and destroyed seventy percent of the nations crops, including most of the banana plants.  The cost was so great, Honduras' President declared the country's economy had been set back fifty years.

This is the other question I always ask at the edge of the wilderness.  What is the importance of biodiversity versus monoculture?  What are the cascading impacts of removing habitat from a country?  Because if Hurricane Mitch were even partly a product of human-induced climate change, the height of its devastation in Honduras, Belize and Nicaragua are believed by scientists to have been largely multiplied by the fact that farmers and the fruit industry have removed, or through soil degredation, weakened, the once rich mangrove coastlines of Caribbean Central America.