Ricardo Graça / Lusa
Fire in Vieira de Leiria, Marinha Grande
We are creating the equivalent of fire at an ice age, plunging earth into the “pyrocene” age. We torted a geological force by using fire to a scale that is altering the earth, water, air and ecosystems.
It has burned in recent weeks, but not alone. In recent years, the fires have struck several cities not only in the US, as well as in Australia, Greece and Portugal.
“This is another case of a future not only terrible but strange, without a narrative that unites the past to the present or an analogous for what is about to come?”, Asks with concern Stephen Pynea “historian of fire”, from Arizona State University.
The teacher’s answer is philosophical: “We have an narrative and an analog”.
The narrative is the uninterrupted saga of humanity and fire, a company that extends throughout our existence as a species. The analog is that humanity’s fire practices have become so vast, especially in the last centuries, that We are creating the fire equivalent to an ice age.
We made the fire our friend
Humanity and fire have been redoing the earth from the end of the last glaciation for about 11,500 years. Generally, these changes made the FIRE RECIVE LANDSCAPES.
The scale is significant. Recent studies speculate that massive depopulation, especially in the Americas, which removed the torch and allowed forests to recover land and thus kidnap atmospheric carbon, may have helped push the planet into the small ice age from the mid -century to mid -nineteenth century.
Still, there were limits. Fire and life had coevolved over 420 million years, and ecological controls and balances limited how far humans could push and pull fire within terrestrial landscape restrictions.
The process accelerated and changed with character, no doubt, with the massive burning of fossil fuelsor what we can designate for lithic landscapes. This combustion is outside the old limits: You can burn anytime, anywhere, and your effluents are not easily absorbed by old ecology.
When warming the atmosphere, it is one of the main causes of climate changewhich, in turn, is usually improving the conditions for forest fires.
Equally important, a “Pyrotechnic” transition for a civilization of fossil fuels It has affected the way people live on earth, how they conceive cities and periurban communities, as lived landscapes with agriculture and natural reserves, how they generate and transmit energy and what kind of fire practices adopt.
The perspective of aggravation of fires due to the alteration of the use of soils and fire fighting practices was evident before climate change became a serious issue in the 1990s.
The world is burning
No isolated factor drives the fire: it synthesizes what surrounds you.
Sometimes it confronts a sharp curve called climate change. Sometimes it is a complicated cross where the urban landscape and the field meet. Sometimes it is the road dangers left by past accidents, such as the residues of forest exploitation, the invasive herbs or the post-looked environments.
Climate change acts as a performance enhancer and, understandably, are the ones that attention most attract, because they are global and their range goes beyond the flames. But the discussion about whether climate or land use is more critical It is poorly oriented: Both independently derive from conversion to a fossil fuel society.
Who plays with the fire…
In the US, the pyrotechnic transition triggered a vacancy of monstrous fires that accompanied colonization – fires of a larger and more lethal order than those of recent decades.
Land expanding and wood cutting fed serial conflagrations that burst in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century – the final decades of the small ice age.
This devastation inspired the federal government to intervene to end environmental wreckage, save watersheds and protect communities, all under the aegis of conservation, which has become a global project.
Fire control was considered fundamental; The suppression of the fires has become a success rate. Led by Silvicultors, the belief that fire in the landscapes could be replaced, as was happening in cities, or caged, such as in ovens and dynamics.
With the natural fire and the traditional burning from the landscape, the fire population decreased to the point where the flames could no longer do the necessary eco -work.
Instead of reducing risk, landscapes have become prone to fire more explosive as fuels accumulated over decades.
Currently, it is burned too much fossil biomass to be absorbed within the ancient ecological limits. The fuels in the living landscape accumulate and reorganize. The climate is becoming unbalanced. When the flame returns, as it has to return, it often comes up as a fire.
Welcome to “Pyrocene”
If we widen the opening a little, says Stephen Pyne, we can imagine the Earth entering an era of fire comparable to the glacial ages of the Pleistocenewith the pyro equivalent of ice sheets, rainwater lakes, periglacial outwash plains, mass extinctions and sea level changes. It is a time when The fire is simultaneously the main engine and the main expression.
The fires in living landscapes, the fires that burn lithic landscapes – the interaction of these two domains of fire has not been much studied. It has been difficult enough to fully include human fire practices in traditional ecology.
However, human beings-the key species for fire on earth-are merging the two terrestrial fire arenas with a giving and receiving that is remodeling the planet as it resembles one in a slow chamber.
Adding all effects, direct and indirect:
Ice expelled by fire, burned areas, biogeographic migrations as biotas move to adapt to altered conditions, river basin and damaged atmospheric impacts, the disaggregation of ecosystems, the omnipresent power of climate change, a Sea level climb, a mass extinction, the disturbance of human life and habitats…
The result is a pyrogeography that is frighteningly similar to an ice age for the fire. We have a “pyrocene” to mature.
