A provocative rethinking of how humans and fire have evolved together
over time--and our responsibility to reorient this relationship before
it's too late.
The Pyrocene tells the story of what happened when a fire-wielding
species, humanity, met an especially fire-receptive time in Earth's
history. Since terrestrial life first appeared, flames have flourished.
Over the past two million years, however, one genus gained the ability
to manipulate fire, swiftly remaking both itself and eventually the
world. We developed small guts and big heads by cooking food; we climbed
the food chain by cooking landscapes; and now we have become a geologic
force by cooking the planet.
Some fire uses have been direct: fire applied to convert living
landscapes into hunting grounds, forage fields, farms, and pastures.
Others have been indirect, through pyrotechnologies that expanded
humanity's reach beyond flame's grasp. Still, preindustrial and
Indigenous societies largely operated within broad ecological
constraints that determined how, and when, living landscapes could be
burned. These ancient relationships between humans and fire broke down
when people began to burn fossil biomass--lithic landscapes--and
humanity's firepower became unbounded. Fire-catalyzed climate change
globalized the impacts into a new geologic epoch. The Pleistocene
yielded to the Pyrocene.
Around fires, across millennia, we have told stories that explained the
world and negotiated our place within it. The Pyrocene continues that
tradition, describing how we have remade the Earth and how we might
recover our responsibilities as keepers of the planetary flame.
