The Pyrocene [October, 2022]

The Pyrocene, Stephen J. Pyne 2021

“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.”

“The first species to be domesticated was not a species at all but a peculiar process, a reaction that was not alive but came from the living world and so had some of its properties. It was a model for what followed. To domesticate a species was to bring it into the domus of a shared fire.”

“In a fire age we can expect big geographic shifts, an expansion of the dominion of fire, rises in sea level, mass extinctions, all amid a radical reconstitution of climate as fire makes a world more favourable to fire. In truth climate history has become a sub narrative of fire history.”