The Pyrocene

Human civilization depended on many things. We usually consider the development of agriculture as a pivotal factor. However, even before that, man had to master fire. Humankind, alone among all species, has evolved thanks in no small part to putting fire to work for us.

Thousands of years later we see where our connection to fire has brought civilization. We are now reaping what, for millennia, we have sowed. This is the pyrocene.

It wasn't until the industrial revolution and the era of fossil fuels that the pyrocene turned on us.

With increasing frenzy, humans are binge-burning fossil fuels. They are taking fuel out of the geologic past, burning it in the present with complex (and little understood) interactions, and then releasing the effluent into the geologic future. Industrial combustion has restructured the dynamics of fire on Earth. Fossil fuel combustion acts as an enabler, as a performance enhancer, and by its disrupting effects on the atmosphere as a globalizer. It has ensured that little of the Earth will be untouched by fire’s reach if not its grasp.

...Add up all these fire influences — those directly through flame, those indirectly through smoke, removed fire, fire-enabled land use, and a warming climate — and you have the contours of a planetary fire age, the fire-informed equivalent of an ice age. You have a Pyrocene.

The Pyrocene proposes a fire-centric perspective on how humans continue to shape the Earth. It renames and redefines the Anthropocene according to humanity’s primary ecological signature, which is our ability to manipulate fire. It comes with a narrative — the long alliance between fire and humans. It proposes an analogy for the future — the sum of our fire practices is creating a fire age that is equivalent in stature to the ice ages of the Pleistocene. With fire as a theme, it offers a sideways view on climate change, continental scale shifts in biogeography, the sixth extinction, changes in ocean chemistry and sea level, and the character of the human presence on Earth. Like fire, the Pyrocene integrates its surroundings — geographic, historical, institutional, intellectual.

Nature’s fire has existed since plants colonized continents, some 420 million years ago. Anthropogenic fire has existed in some form for most of the Pleistocene, probably 2 million years or more, though it became a growing planetary presence across the Holocene, the last 10,000 years. It complemented and competed with nature’s fire. Initially, over the past two centuries, industrial combustion competed as well by seeking technological substitutes where possible and otherwise suppressing open fire wherever possible. Now, thanks to how it has restructured landscapes and unmoored climate, third fire is colluding with the others.

Over the last century, the terms of these interactions have changed. Something flipped. In unprecedented ways the Earth had too much bad fire, too little good fire, and too much combustion overall. It was not simply fire’s indirect relationship to climate that was upset: the whole of fire’s presence on Earth was deranged. The sum of humanity’s fire practices have overwhelmed the existing arrangement of ecological baffles and barriers. Fire is creating the conditions for more fire.

The author of the pyrocene theory, Stephen Pyne, offers several options for taming fire and returning it to man's service. There is, however, one precondition.

All these mitigations will fail unless we end the burning of fossil fuels. That is the deep, destabilizing presence, and so long as it continues (or in its current state, accelerates), efforts to ameliorate its effects will falter. Yet as the most recent IPCC report emphasizes, global warming is already baked into the planet for decades, perhaps centuries. Moreover, even replacing combustion as an energy source with sun and wind will still leave the structures that a fossil-fuel civilization created. We will still have exurbs at risk from fire; landscapes both slashed and uncultivated and prone to blowups; and biotas starved for the right kind of burning.

If we were smart we might begin looking into how to fix this. We're not smart.