Draft:SJ Pyne

• Comment: I have no idea what this article is supposed to be about. Qcne (talk) 16:06, 21 December 2023 (UTC)

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   The Pyrocene is a concept that argues that humanity’s collective fire practices have become an informing presence, and a geological force, on Earth.  Fire practices include not only those activities that start and stop fires among living biomass, but also those that involve fossil biomass along with those pyrotechnologies that enable people to leverage their influence.  In short, the Pyrocene offers a fire-centric perspective on human history that can serve as an alternative or complementary term for the Anthropocene.

The foundational premise is that humanity and fire formed an alliance that has increased the range and power of each. Humanity has become Earth’s keystone species for fire. Fire has, in turn, carried humans to every landscape on Earth, and even to the Moon. Humanity now enjoys a species monopoly over fire’s manipulation, which makes fire its unique ecological signature. While fire has been on Earth some 420 million years, as long as terrestrial life, humanity has expanded it into a planetary presence capable of upsetting biogeochemical cycles, of rewiring energy flows, and through the accumulation of emitted greenhouse gases into the atmosphere of perturbing global climate. To advocates for the Pyrocene as an informing metaphor, humanity’s combustion habits are creating the fire-informed equivalent of an ice age, complete with climate change, biogeographical shifts, changes in sea level, mass extinctions, and everywhere fire-catalyzed landscapes replacing ice.

	The term was first used by fire historian Stephen Pyne in an article, “Fire Age,” published by "Aeon" in 2015, then announced in more fully developed form in 2019, again in "Aeon," used to frame the September, 2019 issue of "Natural History" magazine, and provided a coda to a revision of "Fire: A Brief History." In 2021 he condensed his notions into a small book, "The Pyrocene. How Humans Created a Fire Age, and What Happens Next."  The book has been translated into Italian and Portuguese, with Danish, Finnish, Korean, and Chinese editions underway. 
   In his original conception, Pyne imagined the Pyrocene as coextensive with the Holocene, commencing as a fire-wielding species interacted with a fire-warming Earth.  He introduced the term “pyric transition” to describe the subsequent phase change that occurred when humans began to burn fossil biomass (or what he calls “lithic landscapes”) in place of surface biomass (“living landscapes”).  Burning in living landscapes comes with a long evolutionary history of ecological checks and balances.  Burning fossil biomass lacks those baffles and barriers; the available sources overwhelm the sinks, unhinging air, seas, and terrestrial biotas.  What both realms of combustion share is an unbroken narrative of humanity’s relationship to fire.
   As a term “Pyrocene” itself has entered mainstream journalism and publishing.  Many adopters of the Pyrocene as a concept have modified it to refer to that shorter era characterized by burning fossil fuels, or to that still briefer era of accelerated fossil-fuel burning that occurred after World War II.  Some consider it a feature best restricted to the 21st century with its eruption of serial conflagrations. And for some commentators the term serves simply as a metaphor, shorn of its conceptual scaffolding.