by VICTORIA JAGGARD
PHOTO/Wikipedia
One of the burning questions about the Anthropocene is also one of the most basic: If we are in a new human-caused geologic period, when did it begin?
Some of the more common suggested answers involve the dawn of agriculture around 11,000 years ago, the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s and even the height of atomic bomb testing in the 1950s. But one of the more unusual possibilities stretches even further back in time, to when humans first harnessed fire.
“I think fire would be a really important marker of that, because you know, it begins to manage landscapes on a grand scale,” Jon Christensen, an environmental writer at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, told producers of the Generation Anthropocene podcast.
In this week’s episode, producer Miles Traer speaks with fire historian Stephen J. Pyne of Arizona State University about the evolution of fire and how human interactions with its various incarnations have changed the planet.
Smithsonian for more