22 Comments

Great piece! There’s a lot covered here but in an interesting way. I couldn’t agree more with the caption on the solar meadow photo: “all climate solutions should also be biodiversity solutions”. I write a lot about this in my newsletter.

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Thanks, Jonathan. Glad to hear someone else is beating that drum too. I said a bit more about it in an older piece, "A Flat Tire and a Dead Battery," you can find in the archive. But anyway it really feels like it should be gospel for the path forward. It will take a public/policy sensibility that puts both crises on equal footing, though.

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Thanks. Will check it out. Yep, totally agree. Just worry about the speed at which sensible new policies are put in place. Multiple successive governments have done too little. Let’s keep beating the drum!

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Definitely too little, and too late to avoid so much suffering. But I suppose there's an inevitable logic in taking several generations to patch up what several generations have screwed up. I'm not advocating a slow response, to be clear, just not surprised by it...

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Sep 27Liked by Jason Anthony

I have all the books you mentioned except yours. Get the new edition out when you have the time! I think you're one of the best writers on Substack and that's saying something.

I won't indulge myself with one of my jeremiads but to say, here in the greater Yellowstone bioregion where I currently am, we are experiencing record breaking heat, there are fewer birds than I can remember from 50+ years of coming here, and there are so many dead animals on the sides of roads, struck by vehicles,that I am constantly saying prayers for them. Usually coming back home here is joyous, but this year there is a cloud.

There is an ongoing tragedy and I feel the proper theme music for the Pyrocene, the Petrocene, the Anthropocene is Mozart's Requiem Mass.

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Thank you as always for your kindness, Michael. I'll try to keep earning the praise. I hope that you and the greater Yellowstone area make it through the heat, and long-term I'd like to see the momentum for wildlife crossings out there and elsewhere keep building. Amid the requiem there are hopeful notes, like Heather and I stopping today to carry a baby snapping turtle across the road.

And thanks for your interest in Hoosh, though I have to say you'll find it to be very different than what I'm doing here. What I really need to do is conjure up a book or two from this writing, but I'm still working on what that would look like.

On the requiem theme, you've probably seen this in one of my pieces, but years ago I was really struck by a line in one of Kafka's notebooks. It stands alone, a dark aphorism: "The evolution of mankind - a growth of death-force." It certainly works as a descriptor from the point of view of the rest of life, right?

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Sep 28Liked by Jason Anthony

I don't think I'd care for hoosh!! That must be somebody else. 🙂

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You are the best! Funny how we were both thinking about fire the week this came out.

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Well, stories of fire and rain seem to be always at hand these days, though rarely in the same place. Thanks, Amanda.

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Great piece, Jason. I’ve run across Pyne before, but thanks for leading us into the depth of his thinking. Something terribly exciting in seeing everything through the lens of our partnership with fire.

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Thank you, Priscilla. Glad to hear of someone else's familiarity with Pyne. He's such a strong writer and thinker. And yes, "partnership" is his idea exactly.

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Great stuff, as always, Jason. Thanks. I'd welcome reading more of your thoughts on the petrochemistry reference. (Or perhaps you can send us toward something you've already written on it?) In some respects, maybe the Haber–Bosch process is equivalent to that moment early hominids began to harness fire — one of the Titans stealing nutrients/fertilizer from the Gods (e.g. the Earth, including its atmosphere), pivotal in the rise of Anthropocene-scale agriculture?

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My favorite frame of reference for this is the Planetary Boundaries concept (https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html, and https://www.pik-potsdam.de/en/news/latest-news/earth-exceed-safe-limits-first-planetary-health-check-issues-red-alert). I've written about the PB idea quite a bit, but need to redo it. If you look at the nine boundaries, fossil fuels are directly or indirectly bound up in all of them. Among the direct results are the Novel Entities (plastics and other petrochemicals) invented and made ubiquitous in every bioregion across the globe. Methane feeds the HB process, and the serious greenhouse gas nitrous oxide is a product.

The folks behind the PB work are brilliant, and have gotten better at getting their message out, but they still need a team of science communicators to make the image and the science ready for prime-time. Versions of it should be taught from early education through university, and used to set policy goals, etc.

Stealing from the gods, definitely, though the gods are largely microbial and have been doing a better job of managing earthly affairs for very long time...

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I've enjoyed reading your work and, as a teacher, appreciate the resource links you share. I was interested in reading the book excerpt you suggested, but the link didn't work, and I couldn't seem to find the source based on your description. Would appreciate any help...

"I’ll recommend two excellent older articles, a short 2019 book excerpt in Natural History (pdf download) and a 2020 essay at Yale e360"

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Hi Kate, thank you for being an attentive reader, and my apologies for the broken link. Try this page on Pyne's site, and click on the article, "Welcome to the Pyrocene." https://www.stephenpyne.com/disc.htm

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Great, thanks so much!

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And there are a ton of other readings of his on that page too. Enjoy...

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deletedSep 27
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Okay, good, thanks for that check. It's not a topic I'm well-versed in, esp. when it gets down to the particulars. I'll look at the Heated piece. Seems to me that it all comes down to nuanced management on what exactly can/should be logged in any given forest, and on having strict guardrails on logging behavior. But I'm sure it gets messy between federal and state land management.

A book club sounds good, but I still need to carve out the time to participate...

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Right … I’m dreaming, anyway. I’m several chapters behind in the two book clubs I’m already a part of!

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Rebecca, I’d adore a book club like that! Talking about the questions that matter so urgently now. And finding company with them.

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Agreed! Now, who could organize it … ??

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