From Pleistocene to Pyrocene: Fire Replaces Ice

Abstract

Fire offers a special perspective by which to understand the Earth being remade by humans. Fire is integrative, so intrinsically interdisciplinary. Fire use is unique to humans, so a tracer of humanity's ecological impacts. Anthropogenic fire history shows the long influence of humans on Earth and even climate; in particular, it tracks the continuities between the burning of living landscapes and the transition to burning lithic (fossil) ones, an inflection so immense that climate history is now a subnarrative of fire history. Through our varied burnings, humans are driving out all the relics of the Pleistocene and replacing them with fire equivalents, or in short, creating a Pyrocene.