Fires in Greece, deadly heatwaves in the US Pacific north-west and a season of burning in California have all happened around the publication of the latest IPCC report this week. The events have coincided with extreme acts of nature hitting the planet globally, making it plain that our footprint on Earth is more and more visible. The IPCC report makes for sobering reading and carries the message that we must act now.
ut what we call the Anthropocene – the proposed ecological era that dates humanity’s significant impact on Earth and its ecosystems, including climate change – could also be called something else, something darker. Listening to the radio this week, I came across Stephen J Pyne and his research into fire. Professor Pyne is a specialist in environmental history and, most interestingly, the history of fire. He has written more than a dozen books on fire and its history.
Fire is our most intimate of resources on Earth: we cook our meals with it, heat our homes and make our tools with it. We are the fire ape and the holder of the flame, as Pyne puts it. Fire is unique to our planet, occurring nowhere else in the solar system. It can only exist in nature from the natural presence of life on the continents, so it too has a birth date some 500 million years ago. It was only with the emergence of ourselves that fire began to be harnessed for personal use.
Read More
That personal use allowed us to eat a cooked, meat-rich diet and then turn our attention to clearing landscapes. Fire was the tool that allowed us to mould the Earth as we saw fit. Fire-stick farming, such as that practised by Aboriginal Australians, created great grass plains where animals could graze and be hunted at ease. Indeed, when the first British settlers went to Australia, they likened the fire-shaped landscape to England’s countryside and parkland.
However, in shaping the landscape, in changing the setting and surroundings, we unwittingly started the next phase of our climate story: the Pyrocene, a term coined by Pyne.
The Pyrocene, or fire age, started in small ways, in its first epoch, with the clearing of terrain for agricultural needs. In our own nation, we can look at the ancient and regular setting of gorse fires to clear land for animal grazing.
This Pyrocene origin did interact with the world around it: it changed landscapes, but it also allowed humanity to go to the top of the food chain. We cooked the animals, but, as Pyne says, we are now cooking the planet. The Pyrocene started its second epoch with the emergence of the Industrial Revolution, when our fossil fuels were burned day and night, leading to the eventual tipping point at which we now find ourselves.
From being the custodian of fire, we have so changed our world that fire is now, as a result of our actions, out of control: 2019/2020 was a unique six-month window in that two major fires types burned on the globe. On one hand, we have the man-made fires of the Amazon, where land was cleared to make way for agricultural grazing, while on the opposite side of the world, climate-induced fires ripped through the Australian bush, burning 18.6 million hectares.
The Brazilian wildfires were the direct result of human actions, with 80,000 fires set across Brazil in August 2019. The smoke from these Amazonian fires could be seen in Sao Paulo on the opposite side of the country. The Brazilian wildfires were the result of a pro-business approach to opening up the interior of the Amazon. Fire is not an adaptation of the Amazonian forests, and so rather than bring on new life it ended it.
The climate-induced fires of the Australian bush, on the other hand, point to a worrying trend around the world. These bushfires or wildfires are now a factor of life in many regions of the world. The scale of the Australian bushfires, while not the biggest in Australian history, were the worst in the modern era, eclipsing the 2009 Black Saturday fires, a period I lived through in that land. Indeed, nearly 80pc of Australians were affected in some way by the 2019/2020 fires, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars in costs.
The Pyrocene is not limited to the southern hemisphere. North of the Equator, fires have raged. After all, California, say, has seen wildfire after wildfire rip through the state. Closer to home, one only has to look to the fires in Greece of recent days.
More than 2,000 people on the Greek island of Evia were forced to evacuate by boat as wildfires raged through the region. July, as reported in this paper, was the worst month for wildfires since records began in 2003. In our small nation, we have experienced mini-droughts and record-breaking temperatures in recent years. One only has to think of the recent heatwave that saw the mercury hit 31.4C in Northern Ireland.
The authors of the IPCC report stated that, since 1970, global surface temperatures have risen faster than in any other 50-year period in the past 2,000 years. The Pyrocene is now not just a term coined by Pyne, it is a facet of life. We must act now in this Code Red for humanity. We cannot allow the planet to burn. The IPCC report comes in the light of the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015, when we committed as a species to prevent the global temperature rise.
If we cannot achieve those goals, fire will become all too common a facet of our yearly news cycle. This fire will not bring new life in its long train; ultimately, it will destroy everything. It’s not too late to act, but zero hour is nearing. The world-ending fire is but an ember now; it’s time to quench it and bring an end to this devastating Pyrocene age.
Read More