Long, Interesring Book Excerpt From Stephen Pyne On The Pyrocene
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The planet’s current unhinged pyrogeography has also been shaped by fires that should have been present and weren’t. These are the fires historically set by nature or people to which landscapes had adapted. Now those fires are mostly gone, and the land has responded by degrading ecologically while building up combustibles to stoke more savage wildfires. The Earth’s fire crisis, that is, is not just about the bad burns that trash countrysides and crash into towns. It is equally about the good fires that have vanished because they were extinguished or no longer lit. The Earth’s biota is disintegrating as much by tame fire’s absence as by feral fire’s outbreaks.
There is a third facet to this planetary fire triangle, one that looks beyond present and absent fires to deep time. Its combustibles come not from living biomass, but from lithic ones. 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.
The dialectic between burning living and lithic landscapes explains most of the paradoxes of Earth’s current fire scene. The first is that the more we try to remove fire from places that have co-evolved with it, the more violently fire will return. Without the counterforce provided by petrol-powered machines, from helicopters to portable pumps, there could have been no serious effort to exclude fire in the first place. Second, while wildfires gather more and more media attention, the amount of land actually burned overall is shrinking. Fossil fuel societies find surrogates for fire and remove it (or suppress it) from landscapes. California experienced 4.2 million burned acres in 2020; in pre-industrial times, it would have known perhaps 15 million to 20 million acres burned, though not in wild surges. Fire would have resembled irrigated fields, not sprawling floods. The third paradox is that as we ratchet down fossil fuel burning, we’ll have to ratchet up our burning of living landscapes. We have a fire deficit. We have many landscapes ill-adapted to what they are experiencing. We need to make firescapes more robust against what is coming, and fire is the surest way to do it.
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.
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https://grist.org/wildfires/welcome-to-the-pyrocene/
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