The Pyrocene
I coined the term Pyrocene as a catchphrase in a 2015 essay titled "Fire Age" published in Aeon. Since then I've started using it regularly, and in 2019 began to propose it as an informing principle (in a literary sense) by which to understand the world our pact with fire has made. I have long regarded all of the Holocene as an Anthropocene. From a fire perspective I now regard the Anthropocene as a Pyrocene.
This page has links or PDFs from essays I've written on the theme. I'm at work on a short book that will develop the notion with more heft. Basically, the concept says we are in a Fire Age of comparable scale to the Ice Ages of the Pleistocene. Its core premise is that we made an alliance with fire that gave us small guts and big heads, and then took us to the top of the food chain, and now threatens to unhinge the planet. Whether that alliance is a mutual assistance pact or a Faustian bargain may be the question of our time.
The planet is burning (expanded essay in Aeon, Nov 2019)
Winter Isn't Coming. Prepare for the Pyrocene
Fire Age (original essay from Aeon, 2015)
Portal to the Pyrocene (commentary on Fort MacMurray fire)
A webinar hosted by the PNW Fire Science Exchange - a visual introduction to the concept of the Pyrocene as an analogue of an ice age informed by fire. Some audio troubles, so the techs added CC. (Jan 2020)
An op-ed for the Guardian (US). For a fuller, more nuanced version (before editing to fit it to op-ed specifications) see "Burning bush, burning Earth" under Blogs.
Fire history as big history, with an emphasis on the shift from burning living landscapes to burning lithic ones.
California is built to burn, but the serial conflagrations of the past three years make a useful point of departure - if only to get attention - to a coming fire age. For a Spanish translation, click here.