Human use of fire has produced an era of uncontrolled burning: Welcome to the #Pyrocene
by Stephen Pyne, The Conversation, January 22, 2025
"#LosAngeles is burning, but it isn't alone. In recent years, fires have blasted through cities in #Colorado, the southern #Appalachians and the island of #Maui, along with #Canada, #Australia, #Portugal and #Greece. What wasn't burned was smoked in.
"Is this another case of a future not only dire but strange, without a narrative to join past to present or an analog for what is to come?
"I'm a historian of fire, and my reply is that we have both a narrative and an analog. The narrative is the unbroken saga of humanity and fire, a companionship that extends through all our existence as a species. The analog is that humanity's fire practices have become so vast, especially in recent centuries, that we are creating the fire equivalent of an ice age."
[...]
Welcome to the Pyrocene
"Widen the aperture a bit, and we can envision Earth entering a fire age comparable to the ice ages of the Pleistocene, complete with the pyric equivalent of ice sheets, pluvial lakes, periglacial outwash plains, mass extinctions and sea-level changes. It's an epoch in which fire is both prime mover and principal expression.
"Humanity's firepower underpins the #Anthropocene, which is the outcome not just of #anthropogenic meddling but of a particular kind of meddling, made possible by humans' species monopoly over fire. Even climate history has become a subset of fire history.
"Fires in living landscapes, fires burning lithic landscapes—the interaction of these two realms of fire has not been much studied. It's been enough of a stretch to fully include human fire practices within traditional ecology. Yet humans—the keystone species for fire on Earth—are merging the two arenas of earthly burning with a give and take that is reshaping the planet in what resembles a slow-motion #Ragnarok.
"Add up all the effects, direct and indirect: the ice driven off by fire, the areas burning, the biogeographical #migrations as biotas move to accommodate changed conditions, the collateral impacts with damaged #watersheds and #airsheds, the unraveling of #ecosystems, the pervasive power of #ClimateChange, #RisingSeaLevels, a #MassExtinction, the disruption of human life and habitats. The result is a #pyrogeography that looks eerily like an ice age for fire. You have a maturing Pyrocene.
"If you doubt it, just ask California."
Full article (it's a good read):
https://phys.org/news/2025-01-human-era-uncontrolled-pyrocene.html
#Wildfires #UncontrolledFires #HistoryOfFire #PyroceneEra #ControlledBurning #ClimateCrisis
