Fire expert Steve Pyne says New Mexico’s largest recorded fire — one-third still burning — has a lesson for us but it isn’t to stop prescribed burns. That was definitely the cause of New Mexico’s fire. Managing fire needs every tool we’ve got, he urges, with flexibility the key.
Binge-burning of fossil fuels has put afterburners on our millennia-long process of ending the Pleistocene, its ice and its mammoths. Welcome to the Pyrocene.
As wildfires explode in the West but even in Greenland, fire expert Steve Pyne helps us understand the “pyrocene,” the planetary age of fire, one that we have created.
