Our 'alliance with fire'
And other things you might want to know about The Pyrocene
Volume 2, Number 43 - Monday, May 6
Published every Monday and Thursday
Perspective
STEPHEN J. PYNE coined the term “Pyrocene” in 2015 and the term has made it into the dictionary and a Google search turns up more than 30,000 references.
Pyne’s book, “The Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next,” was published in 2021; “Pyrocene Park: A Journey into the Fire History of Yosemite National Park,” was published a year ago, and “Five Suns: A Fire History of Mexico” was published April 30. He is an emeritus professor at Arizona State University, and these are just a few of his books.
Below, you’ll find excerpts from an article by Pyne published last month in Scientific American that’s titled: “Fire Forged Humanity. Now It Threatens Everything — Ancient prophecies of worlds destroyed by fire are becoming realities. How will we respond?”
But first, I’m going to share a few definitions that might help — because I had to look up a few words that Pyne uses to describe The Pyrocene.
On his website, he said:
I coined the term Pyrocene as a catchphrase in a 2015 essay titled "Fire Age" published in Aeon. Since then I've started using it regularly, and in 2019 began to propose it as an informing principle (in a literary sense) by which to understand the world our pact with fire has made. I have long regarded all of the Holocene as an Anthropocene. From a fire perspective I now regard the Anthropocene as a Pyrocene.
Holocene, Anthropocene, Pyrocene — my head was spinning… how can I understand what he’s saying if I don’t understand the terms? Fortunately, we have Google (and Wikipedia), so to save you the trouble:
The Holocene is the current geological epoch, beginning approximately 11,700 years ago, and the Anthropocene is the common name for a proposed geological epoch, dating from the commencement of significant human impact on Earth up to the present day. It affects Earth's geology, landscape, limnology, ecosystems and climate.
I needed a little more information to try to understand geological epoch and found a presentation about geological time and Earth’s biological history HERE very helpful.
If I’m understanding correctly, scientists have developed a system to study Earth’s history and named geological epochs (such as Holocene, Pleistocene and others, including the Jurassic — made famous by dinosaurs).
Some scientists believe the Holocene is Anthropocene — significantly impacted by humans — and Pyne regards the Anthropocene as a Pyrocene. As he states on his website:
Basically, the concept says we are in a Fire Age of comparable scale to the Ice Ages of the Pleistocene. Its core premise is that we made an alliance with fire that gave us small guts and big heads, and then took us to the top of the food chain, and now threatens to unhinge the planet. Whether that alliance is a mutual assistance pact or a Faustian bargain may be the question of our time.
Why do I think what Pyne thinks matters and is relevant to giant sequoias?
Mostly because I think we need a better grasp on fire and its place in our world — and our history — to better understand the issues faced in our Sierra Nevada forests (and elsewhere).
Pyne began to learn about fire as a member of a forest fire crew. Starting a few days after graduating from high school, he returned to this work for 15 seasons — 12 as a crew boss. “On a fire crew, you quickly learn how fires can shape a season and how seasons can shape a life. I found a way to reconcile my two lives and became a scholar on fire,” he writes in the recent Scientific American article.
I encourage you to read it all HERE, and here are a few more excerpts:
Earth is a fire planet, the only one we know of. Earth has fire because it has life. Life created the oxygen fire needs; life created and arranges the fuel it requires. Even the chemistry of fire is a biochemistry: fire takes apart what photosynthesis puts together. As long as terrestrial life has existed, so has fire.
Fire takes on some properties of the living world it depends on. In ways, it resembles a virus—something not truly alive but that requires the living world to propagate. And like a virus, fire propagates by contagion.
The one requirement of fire that life did not furnish was ignition. That changed with the appearance of a genus, now a single species, that could start fire at will: ours. Humans became unique fire creatures. We used fire to remake ourselves, and then we and fire remade Earth.
And …
Our relationship with fire grew as we domesticated it. Fire had to be birthed, fed, trained, sheltered, tended—we even have to clean up after it. For many intellectuals, from Roman architect Vitruvius to 20th-century French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, fire control separates the civilized from the barbaric. Fire is also a core technology and a foundation for chemistry. With fire we turn mud into brick and pottery, limestone into cement, sand into glass, ore into metal; fire always seems to exist somewhere in the life cycle of made things and in built environments. And working fires have illuminated, warmed and powered almost all human activities from religious sacrifices to the forging of weapons.
In a sense, early humans and fire made a pact for mutual assistance: each would expand the realm of the other. People would carry fire to places and times in which it could not have existed otherwise. In return, fire empowered humans to go everywhere and do far more than their primate ancestors could ever have imagined. If humans colonize other planets, they will leave Earth on plumes of flame.
And …
Today we live in a fire age in which ancient prophecies of worlds destroyed and renewed by fire have become contemporary realities, even for people living in modern cities. In the summer of 2023 millions of residents of New York City and other metropolises saw dark-orange daytime skies thick with smoke palls from Canadian wildfires—and breathed in the effluent. Mythology has morphed into ecology. We’re witnessing a slow-motion Ragnarok—a story from Norse mythology in which a great battle burns the world. Climate history is becoming a subnarrative of fire history.
This is a fascinating piece. Excerpts are not enough. Please read it! Here’s the LINK again for convenience.
Wildfire, water & weather update
This news headline says it best: “Sierra Nevada records snowiest day of the season from brief but potent California storm” — The Associated Press
An article in The Washington Post before the storm noted, “The mild and unsettled weather this spring, along with back-to-back wet winters, probably means lower wildfire risk well into summer across much of California.” You can read that article HERE (gift link).
So are we done with this crazy weather? I won’t even speculate.
The best Sierra Nevada weather forecasts are at NWS Hanford, HERE, and NWS Sacramento, HERE.
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Thanks for reading!
PYNE writes like a poet and sees the human situation so uniquely. Thank you for including these excerpts!