An Age of Fire

7/22/21

Jul 23, 2021

Hi Everyone: In this week’s collection of links to other Anthropocene stories, I’ve found 1) a fascinating technical and personal story about an MIT professor with a grand plan to store solar energy in large-scale facilities, 2) an excellent short article on how climate science has underestimated the impacts of current levels of global warming, 3) a National Geographic article on how increased dust in the U.S. West is speeding up spring/summer snow melt and worsening the impacts of the regional drought, 4) a NYT article on China’s new carbon trading market, and 5) a surprising study on the importance of cities for protecting biodiversity.

As usual, links to these stories can be found in Other Earth-Shattering News at the bottom of this newsletter.

Now, on to this week’s main course:

In his review of Elizabeth Kolbert’s White Sky, the extraordinary historian and writer Stephen Pyne says this about the state of the world: “There are simply too many of us doing too much too quickly. We are a start-up species, a biotic Facebook – moving fast, breaking things, hoarding ever more” resources for a burgeoning population with a rapacious appetite and too little regard for other species. We’ve entered what he calls “a whole ecology of interacting crises” caused by human activity. I imagine his list includes erasure on a mass scale of habitats and ecosystems by agriculture, cities, and industry; decline of apex and keystone species across the globe; transformation of microbial life through antibiotics, farming, and eradication of wildlife; overfishing and contamination of the world’s oceans; and most damaging of all, producing CO2 at an unprecedented rate.

If we keep making the same mistakes through this century we’re likely to initiate a mass extinction, perhaps even the worst in 250 million years. If you’ve read anything about mass extinctions (and you should, in Peter Brannen’s marvelous book), this prospect should send you screaming down the aisles. Here’s Brannen from a brilliant article in the Atlantic:

“We are imposing a rate of change on the planet that has almost never happened before in geologic history, while largely preventing life on Earth from adjusting to that change… Taking in the whole sweep of Earth’s history, now we see how unnatural, nightmarish, and profound our current experiment on the planet really is. A small population of our particular species of primate has, in only a few decades, unlocked a massive reservoir of old carbon slumbering in the Earth, gathering since the dawn of life, and set off on a global immolation of Earth’s history to power the modern world. As a result, up to half of the tropical coral reefs on Earth have died, 10 trillion tons of ice have melted, the ocean has grown 30 percent more acidic, and global temperatures have spiked. If we keep going down this path for a geologic nanosecond longer, who knows what will happen? The next few fleeting moments are ours, but they will echo for hundreds of thousands, even millions, of years. This is one of the most important times to be alive in the history of life.”

If you want to see more evidence of our impact on species happening right now, there’s no shortage of articles and studies and books to scratch that itch. A good recent article from Yale e360 is a fine place to start. It explains that plants around the world are moving up in altitude or latitude to find a climate they’ve evolved for, and whole ecosystems are shifting or fracturing as a result: “A 2019 study, for example, projected that Alaska’s interior forests will shift from being dominated by conifers to being dominated by broadleaf trees as soon as the middle of this century.” And a study out just a week ago found that the Amazon rainforest now emits more CO2 than it absorbs. That’s a catastrophic transition of two vast forest ecosystems in our lifetime. Each will have innumerable consequences for biodiversity. With just these two examples in mind, how long a planetary litany should we expect to write over the next few decades?

We know, intellectually, what needs to be done to stave off the worst impacts, but there’s no roadmap either in human history or in the geological record. “Humans,” writes Kolbert, “are producing no-analog climates, no-analog ecosystems, a whole no-analog future. … And so we face a no-analog predicament.” Our increasingly nuanced understanding of Earth history (thanks to generations of geologists who spend entire careers puzzling out thin layers of sediment and fossils around the globe) shows a variety of mass extinctions which occurred after huge spikes in CO2. But those “quick” spikes likely occurred over thousands of years, not decades.

So, a good rule of thumb at this point might be to stop moving fast and breaking things, but the problem with facing up to existential threats new to the species is that the species – that’s us – has a short civilizational memory characterized by a perception of total victory over the forces of nature. We light up the night, convert vast landscapes into housing and food and fuel, explore and inhabit the entire planet, and unnaturally extend our lifespan. Asking eight billion humans to rethink civilization is a little like asking the winning Super Bowl team to go back into the stadium and apologize, both to the fans and to the football, for playing the game.

The motivation to change has to meet a threshold which exceeds the inertia of a well-fed primate on a couch watching YouTube videos. By the time that threshold is reached for enough of these primates – through a series of crises that impact them directly – far too much transformation may have occurred.

Knowing all this, as we more or less do, we’re still busy snapping selfies to post for our fellow Facebookers, both literally and within Stephen Pyne’s metaphor. I’m tempted here to shift direction and talk about the ecological cost of our digital life – data centers consume 1% of global energy production, and Bitcoin energy usage negates all CO2 savings created by electric vehicles – but I want instead to explore some of Pyne’s writing. I’ll start by noting how his brilliant metaphor so smoothly captures the speed and callousness of our rise to power here on Earth – “a biotic Facebook” – as well as the possibility of failure – “a start-up species.”

My familiarity with Pyne is largely through what I consider to be one of the finest books ever written about Antarctica. The Ice: A Journey to Antarctica is a difficult read – it’s often the first book I think of when I hear the word “tome” – but it is masterful, scholarly, creative, and often poetic. Pyne covers the history of Antarctic exploration and contextualizes it in the history of science; he covers the development and particulars of Antarctic science and governance; he covers the sciences themselves, delving into everything from glaciology to penguin biology; and he addresses, in original lyric style, the Antarctic landscape that I fell in love with. The journey into landscape, from sea ice to glacier to ice cap, in fact, structures the entire book. Pyne takes us deeper and deeper into the ice, then leaves us there, awed. Here are a few samples of his prose:

“In a sense, scientific exploration has not simply revealed Antarctica but created it. Eliminate those expeditions sent for scientific purposes and Antarctica would be no better known than Pluto. Strip away scientific concepts and the scientific lexicon and one is left literally speechless before the continent.”
“There is more information in a single penguin than in all the polar plateau.”
“What began as an unknown white spot on the map of the known world would, paradoxically, end up as a known white spot.”

But I digress. (If anyone wants to talk about Antarctica, please start a thread in the Comments and I’ll be happy to digress some more.)

Let’s leave the ice and move on to fire, which, ironically, has been Pyne’s focus for most of his career. Most of his forty or so books have been about the history of fire and our relationship with it. He’s considered to be one of the foremost scholars on the topic. His take on the Anthropocene is through a fiery lens, then, and for him a more appropriate name for this new epoch is the Pyrocene: an age of fire. “I have long regarded all of the Holocene as an Anthropocene,” he writes, and “from a fire perspective I now regard the Anthropocene as a Pyrocene.” Why? Because we are in “a Fire Age of comparable scale to the Ice Ages of the Pleistocene.”

At first glance this might seem like a response to the horrific climate-related increase in the scale and intensity of wildfires around the world, and the likelihood that these will become far worse and far more common, but his idea runs much deeper and begins hundreds of thousands of years ago. We made a “pact” with fire early in our species’ history which gave us cooking, light at night, new hunting techniques, advanced tool-making, increased protection – just think of the implications for cultural development in each of those aspects – and led eventually to sophisticated landscape control. Fast forward to the industrial revolution and the complexity of our existential relationship to fire increased exponentially. We began to burn not just botanical fuels found on the planet’s surface – plants, trees – but fuels excavated from deep underground and from deep time. In making the transition from using natural fire and controlled fire to inventing contained fire – industrial combustion in all its myriad forms – humans and fire together transformed Earth. “Whether that alliance is a mutual assistance pact or a Faustian bargain may be the question of our time,” Pyne says, largely because of the byproduct of all that excess combustion, as you read a few minutes ago in the description by Peter Brannen.

“Fire,” Pyne writes, “brought us power. We got small guts and big heads because we learned to cook food. We went to the top of the food chain because we learned to cook landscapes. Now we have become a geologic force because we have begun to cook the planet.”

It had never occurred to me before reading Pyne that fire was a through-line of the Anthropocene, that we’ve burned our way to the top of the world and now we’re burning our bridges. Of course our bargain with fire didn’t have to become so Faustian. Other cultures continued to live with a rational, small-scale use of fire until we eclipsed them in our metastasizing, fossil-fueled growth. And of course the cost of that fossil-fueled growth isn’t just the toasty Eocene climate barreling toward us. All the rupturing and erasure of biodiversity in the Anthropocene can be linked to the machines and artificial fertilizer and population growth made possible by what we’ve hauled out of the Earth to burn.

Pyne has a new book called The Pyrocene – tagline “How We Created An Age of Fire, and What Happens Next “ – coming out in September from the University of California Press. Judging by what I’ve read elsewhere by him on the topic, it should be essential reading. For now, I’ll recommend two fascinating articles by Pyne, a short 2019 book excerpt in Natural History and a 2020 essay at Yale e360. (Please note: the link to Natural History is a pdf download.) I’d recommend starting with the Natural History piece because it beautifully explains what fire is and means. Here’s a sample:

“The oldest fossil charcoal dates back to the early Devonian Period, roughly 420 million years ago, not long after vascular plants colonized the continents. But that was long after the planet itself formed, 4.5 billion years ago. Earth burns now because it acquired life. Life in the oceans filled the atmosphere with oxygen. Life on land piled fuels. Lightning strikes, the occasional volcano, and the rare extraterrestrial impact then ignited fires.
People raised in urban and industrial societies tend to experience fire within built environments – contained in torches and hearths, or burning wild through structures. But the fundamental story of fire is how it burns in living landscapes, taking apart what photosynthesis puts together. It is an ecological process to which life must adapt, while biological evolution enables and shapes it in turn. Hurricanes and floods can occur without a particle of life present. Fire cannot. It more resembles a locust infestation than an ice storm.”

The e360 piece, “Our Burning Planet: Why We Must Learn to Live with Fire,” addresses the history and consequences of our changing relationship with fire in Pyne’s typical dense and evocative prose: “We have too many bad fires – fires that kill people, burn towns, and trash valued landscapes. We have too few good ones – fires that enhance ecological integrity and hold fires within their historic ranges. At the same time, with the incessant burning of fossil fuels, we have too much combustion on the planet overall. How did fire’s presence on Earth become so deranged?” He goes on to answer his rhetorical question in fine detail, noting that “even climate history has become a sub-narrative of fire history,” and that even as we slow and ideally stop our burning of fossil fuels, we will have no choice but to increase our burning of landscapes. How much? “A lot. And in perpetuity. Fire management is forever.”

There’s a lot to this, so you’ll have to dive in yourself to understand his really, really interesting perspective.

Finally, Pyne isn’t afraid to make terse, sweeping statements about the meaning of things. He writes about humanity’s “two grand narratives for fire,” the Promethean and the Primeval. You can think of this dichotomy as parallel to the distinction between believing that the Earth belongs to us and understanding that in reality we belong to the Earth. Prometheus stole fire from the gods to empower humans, and we’ve imagined ourselves as godlike ever since. The Primeval, in Pyne’s thinking, is our natural relationship with fire: “The Promethean speaks of fire as power, as something abstracted from its natural setting, perhaps by force, and then directed as human hand and mind wish. The Primeval speaks of fire as a companion on our journey, of humans as keystone species and stewards for reconciling fire with land. Our future and that of the Earth depend on which of these narrative paths we choose to follow.”

Regardless of whether we’re looking at the new world through Pyne’s Pyrocene lens, he’s right: The story we tell ourselves is the story of the Earth to come. We’re the author of the future of life on Earth. That’s what the Anthropocene means. From here on we’re either writing a disaster tale or a saga of slow recovery from a fundamental civilizational error.

Remember what Peter Brannen wrote at the end of the excerpt above: “This is one of the most important times to be alive in the history of life.”

That’s a lot to take in, or even believe. Speaking for myself, at least, there’s grief and sadness and anger when I think about it, and there’s a really strong desire to set it aside as I deal with an already complex daily reality. Not to mention that the couch and YouTube are calling.

But there’s good work to be done, and so here we go.

Should I post about all this on Facebook?

[Spoiler: I’m not on Facebook.]

Field Guide to the Anthropocene

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