“In fire historian Stephen Pyne’s opinion, we’re living in an age he calls the Pyrocene, a period of rising global temperatures and wildfires on an unprecedented scale. “If we think about adding up all the ways we’re using fire, we’re creating the fire equivalent of an ice age,” Pyne, the author of the books Between Two Fires: A Fire History of Contemporary America and To the Last Smoke, told Intelligencer. “Climate change, changes in sea level, mass extinctions, large shifts in biogeography — all these kinds of markers that we’ve used for the ice ages are now sort of passed through a pyric looking glass.”

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