I WAS at a conference at Newcastle University last week (Changing Behaviour, Changing Society: Responses To A Changing Climate) in my new capacity as an environmental researcher and feeling a bit of a fraud in the company of so many profs and PhDs.

“What do you do?” asked the man sitting next to me. I told him about my new job, and admitted that I was also an author and journalist. He asked what I’d written.

Cautiously – I didn’t think Confessions Of An Eco-Shopper had made much of an entrée in academic circles – I produced a copy of my book, trying to shield its chick-lit style cover from general view.

“It’s my own personal take on trying to bring about behavioural change,” I whispered, aware that in this august company, a publication with the gossipy subtitle, The True Story Of One Woman’s Mission to Go Green, was the literary equivalent of a hen party gate-crashing a scientific summit.

He smiled, delved into his briefcase, and also retrieved a paperback, which he passed discreetly to me. It had a giant banana on the cover.

“Swap?” he said.

It turned out he was the author Mike Berners-Lee, whose book, How Bad Are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint Of Everything, I’ve read and found really informative and useful. It assesses the impact of everyday and not-so-everyday actions and events, ranging from sending a text message or buying a cappuccino to the amount of carbon dioxide generated by the World Cup or a war.

(Here’s an example: one punnet of strawberries, grown in season in your own country, is responsible for 150g of CO2; an out-of-season, imported punnet produces 1.8 kg of CO2. I’ve just bought the last of the season’s Acaster Malbis strawbs from our local greengrocer – kerrching! – but, even better, I’m got some ripening in my back garden if I can keep the blackbirds off them long enough.

Mike’s book posits a ten-tonne (of CO2) lifestyle – not, as he points out, a long-term sustainable goal for everyone in the world, but a modest aspiration that most people in the UK can meet.

Actually, to hit the targets for emissions reductions we’re committed to in the UK, one’s carbon footprint needs to be about three tonnes per person, but this is almost impossible for anyone who isn’t my friend Compost John because it requires the whole economy to be made greener.

Anyway, once Mike and I had stopped laughing, signed our books for each other and settled down to listen to a speaker on sustainable practices, it occurred to me that I didn’t need to be quite so embarrassed about my own attempts to change my behaviour – and others – and save the world. Mike’s book has the same motive – albeit from a more factual perspective.

It’s horses for courses, or Venus and Mars, but without a chicken in a shopping trolley on the cover.

The fact that his book cover features a banana I find particularly appealing, since being Bananas (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone) has succeeded Nimbyism as the acronym du jour, and there are lot of ’em about. Especially when you mention wind turbines (or even windspeed monitoring masts).

So, how bad are bananas, then?

Not bad at all, as it happens: 80g of CO2 each, which is pretty damn good; “brilliant”, even, according to Mike, who clearly likes bananas a lot. (“To emphasise the point, I am eating one as I write,” he writes. This is now making me feel peckish, so excuse me while I nip to the fruit bowl to keep me going to the end of this column.) The point about this is that all the speakers and delegates at that conference, whatever the nature of our engagement with the subject, were attempting to discover an answer to the same issue. It’s the Holy Grail in environmentalism: how do you persuade people to change their behaviour and live sustainable lifestyles?

It’s something that I’m engaged in at many levels through marketing, community engagement, social science, politics, activism, writing and education and I hope my new job will help me to find some answers.

In the meantime, I’ve been trying to track down a short YouTube film entitled Captured By Showering, recommended by one of the lecturers, about the impact our (relatively recent) practice of daily ablutions has on domestic water consumption.

Unfortunately, all my Google searches have come up with is the kind of shower action beloved of male fantasies.

Academia. It’s a whole new world.