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Pyrocene

The Pyrocene is a concept that argues that humanity’s collective fire practices have become an informing presence, and a geological force, on Earth. Fire practices include all those activities that start and stop fires among living biomass, but also those that involve fossil biomass and those pyrotechnologies that enable people to leverage their influence. In short, the Pyrocene offers a fire-centric perspective on human history that can serve as an alternative to or complementary term for the Anthropocene.

The foundational premise is that humanity and fire formed an alliance that has increased the range and power of each. Humanity has become Earth’s keystone species for fire. Fire has, in turn, carried humans to every landscape on Earth, and even to the Moon. Humanity now enjoys a species monopoly over fire’s manipulation, which makes fire its unique ecological signature. While fire has been on Earth some 420 million years, as long as terrestrial life, humanity has expanded it into a planetary presence capable of upsetting biogeochemical cycles, of rewiring energy flows, and through the accumulation of emitted greenhouse gases into the atmosphere of perturbing global climate to such an extent that climate history has become a subnarrative of fire history. To advocates for the Pyrocene as an informing metaphor, humanity’s combustion habits are creating the pyric equivalent of an ice age, complete with biogeographical shifts, changes in sea level, mass extinctions, and everywhere fire-catalyzed landscapes replacing ice.

History of concept

The term was first used by fire historian Stephen Pyne in an article, “Fire Age,” published by Aeon in 2015, then announced in more fully developed form in 2019, again in Aeon. It helped to frame the September, 2019 issue of Natural History magazine and provided a coda to a revision of Fire: A Brief History. In 2021 he condensed his notions into a small book, ''The Pyrocene. How Humans Created a Fire Age, and What Happens Next''. The book has been translated into Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, and Danish, with Finnish and Korean editions underway. Both Nature and Science have reviewed it.

The term has been picked up by mainstream media, including the New York Times, New York Magazine, Wired, and Los Angeles Times. The New Yorker has included it in a review of recent books with a fire theme. An overview has appeared in Scientific American.

In his original conception, Pyne imagined the Pyrocene as coextensive with the Holocene, commencing as a fire-wielding species interacted with a fire-warming Earth. He introduced the term “pyric transition” to describe the subsequent phase change that occurred when humans began to burn fossil biomass (or what he calls “lithic landscapes”) in place of surface biomass (“living landscapes”). Burning in living landscapes comes with a long evolutionary history of ecological checks and balances. Burning fossil biomass lacks those baffles and barriers; the available sources overwhelm the sinks, unhinging air, seas, and terrestrial biotas. What both realms of combustion share is an unbroken narrative of humanity’s relationship to fire.

Interpretations

As the term has entered a broader audience, it is acquiring different meanings. Many adopters of the Pyrocene as a concept have modified it to refer to that shorter era characterized by burning fossil fuels, or to that still briefer era of accelerated fossil-fuel burning that has occurred after World War II. Some consider it a feature best restricted to the 21st century with its eruption of serial conflagrations. And for some commentators the term serves as a general metaphor, shorn of its conceptual scaffolding, with wildfire as an expression of the mayhem humanity as wrought on Earth.