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Author(s):
Stephen Pyne
Year Published:

Cataloging Information

Topic(s):
Fire History
Fire & Climate

NRFSN number: 22321
FRAMES RCS number: 62197
Record updated:

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.

Citation

Pyne, Stephen J. 2020. From Pleistocene to Pyrocene: fire replaces ice. Earth’s Future 8(11):e2020EF001722. https://doi.org/10.1029/2020EF001722

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