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DoomsdaysCWHuman use of fire has produced an era of uncontrolled burning: Welcome to the #Pyrocene
by Stephen Pyne, The Conversation, January 22, 2025
"#LosAngeles is burning, but it isn't alone. In recent years, fires have blasted through cities in #Colorado, the southern #Appalachians and the island of #Maui, along with #Canada, #Australia, #Portugal and #Greece. What wasn't burned was smoked in.
"Is this another case of a future not only dire but strange, without a narrative to join past to present or an analog for what is to come?
"I'm a historian of fire, and my reply is that we have both a narrative and an analog. The narrative is the unbroken saga of humanity and fire, a companionship that extends through all our existence as a species. The analog is that humanity's fire practices have become so vast, especially in recent centuries, that we are creating the fire equivalent of an ice age."
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Welcome to the Pyrocene
"Widen the aperture a bit, and we can envision Earth entering a fire age comparable to the ice ages of the Pleistocene, complete with the pyric equivalent of ice sheets, pluvial lakes, periglacial outwash plains, mass extinctions and sea-level changes. It's an epoch in which fire is both prime mover and principal expression.
"Humanity's firepower underpins the #Anthropocene, which is the outcome not just of #anthropogenic meddling but of a particular kind of meddling, made possible by humans' species monopoly over fire. Even climate history has become a subset of fire history.
"Fires in living landscapes, fires burning lithic landscapes—the interaction of these two realms of fire has not been much studied. It's been enough of a stretch to fully include human fire practices within traditional ecology. Yet humans—the keystone species for fire on Earth—are merging the two arenas of earthly burning with a give and take that is reshaping the planet in what resembles a slow-motion #Ragnarok.
"Add up all the effects, direct and indirect: the ice driven off by fire, the areas burning, the biogeographical #migrations as biotas move to accommodate changed conditions, the collateral impacts with damaged #watersheds and #airsheds, the unraveling of #ecosystems, the pervasive power of #ClimateChange, #RisingSeaLevels, a #MassExtinction, the disruption of human life and habitats. The result is a #pyrogeography that looks eerily like an ice age for fire. You have a maturing Pyrocene.
"If you doubt it, just ask California."
Full article (it's a good read):
https://phys.org/news/2025-01-human-era-uncontrolled-pyrocene.html
#Wildfires #UncontrolledFires #HistoryOfFire #PyroceneEra #ControlledBurning #ClimateCrisis
Human use of fire has produced an era of uncontrolled burning: Welcome to the Pyrocene
Los Angeles is burning, but it isn't alone. In recent years, fires have blasted through cities in Colorado, the southern Appalachians and the island of Maui, along with Canada, Australia, Portugal and Greece. What wasn't burned was smoked in.
Dr. Ramesh Glückler
juli g pausas