19 August 21
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18 August 21
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Reader Supported News
he latest International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report is clear and foreboding. If the United States, China and the rest of the world do not act extremely aggressively to cut carbon emissions, the planet will face enormous and irreversible damage. The world that we will be leaving our children and future generations will be increasingly unhealthy and uninhabitable.
But we didn’t really need the IPCC to tell us that. Just take a look at what’s happening right now: A huge fire in Siberia is casting smoke for 3,000 miles. Greece: burning. California: burning. Oregon: burning. Historic flooding in Germany and Belgium. Italy just experienced the hottest European day ever. July 2021 was the hottest month ever recorded. Drought and extreme weather disturbances are cutting food production, increasing hunger and raising food prices worldwide. Rising sea levels threaten Miami, New York, Charleston and countless coastal cities around the world in the not-so-distant future.
In the past, these disasters might have seemed like an absurd plot in some apocalypse movie. Unfortunately, this is now reality, and it will only get much worse in years to come if we do not act boldly – now.
The good news is that the $3.5tn budget resolution that was recently passed in the Senate lays the groundwork for a historic reconciliation bill that will not only substantially improve the lives of working people, elderly people, the sick and the poor, but also, in an unprecedented way, address the existential threat of climate change. More than any other legislation in American history it will transform our energy system away from fossil fuels and into energy efficiency and sustainable energy.
This legislation will be a long-overdue step forward in the fight for economic, racial, social and environmental justice. It will also create millions of well-paying jobs. As chair of the Senate budget committee my hope is that the various committees will soon finish their work and that the bill will be on the floor and adopted by Congress in late September.
Let me be honest in telling you that this reconciliation bill, the final details of which are still being written, will not do everything that needs to be done to combat climate change. But by investing hundreds of billions of dollars in the reduction of carbon emissions it will be a significant step forward and will set an example for what other countries should be doing.
Here are some of the proposals that are currently in the bill:
Massive investments in retrofitting homes and buildings to save energy.
Massive investment in the production of wind, solar and other forms of sustainable energy.
A major move toward the electrification of transportation, including generous rebates to enable working families to buy electric vehicles and energy-efficient appliances.
Major investments in greener agriculture.
Major investments in climate resiliency and ecosystem recovery projects.
Major investments in water and environmental justice.
Major investments in research and development for sustainable energy and battery storage.
Billions to address the warming and acidification of oceans and the needs of coastal communities.
The creation of a Civilian Climate Corps which will put hundreds of thousands of young people to work transforming our energy system and protecting our most vulnerable communities.
The Budget Resolution that allows us to move forward on this ambitious legislation was passed last Wednesday at 4am, by a vote of 50-49 after 14 hours of debate. No Republican supported it, and no Republican will support the reconciliation bill. In fact, Republicans have been shamefully absent from serious discussions about the climate emergency.
That means that we must demand that every Democrat supports a reconciliation bill that is strong on solutions to the climate crisis. No wavering. No watering down. This is the moment. Our children and grandchildren are depending upon us. The future of the planet is at stake.
US Marines with the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, RCT 2nd Battalion 8th Marines Echo Co. step off in the early morning during an operation to push out Taliban fighters in Herati, Afghanistan, on July 18, 2009. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty)
The Defense Department has “subjected service members to Kafkaesque ordeals that have further delayed their attempts to become U.S. citizens,” an ACLU lawyer said.
he American Civil Liberties Union is seeking to force the Pentagon to abandon a Trump administration policy and reinstate an expedited path to citizenship for foreign-born members of the military, according to court papers filed late Tuesday.
The motion to enforce, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, claims the military has defied a court decision that found the policy imposing minimum service requirements on new recruits to be unlawful.
“The Department of Defense is defying a federal court order to restore an expedited path to citizenship for U.S. military service members,” the ACLU said in a statement to NBC News Wednesday.
In 2017, the Trump administration created a policy that blocked an expedited path to citizenship for new service members, and instead required them to serve for six months to a year before they were eligible for the military certification required to apply to become naturalized citizens.
The ACLU filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of thousands of U.S. military service members in April 2020, claiming the policy violated the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), which provides non-US citizens the right to naturalize quickly if they serve honorably in the U.S. military, waiving many of the other requirements for citizenship. In many cases, the INA allows for service members to become U.S. citizens before military deployment.
Four months later, the federal district court sided with the ACLU, ruling the military cannot impose those minimum service requirements before service members can seek citizenship based on their military service. The court also said the military must process paperwork within 30 days.
Trump’s Pentagon appealed the decision, but the court has not yet ruled on that appeal and now, one year later, the ACLU claims the military is still enforcing the policy and blocking expedited citizenship for new recruits.
“Over the past year, numerous class members at multiple U.S. Army installations consistently report that military officials continue to impose these unlawful requirements and obstruct service members from seeking U.S. citizenship in direct violation of the court’s order,” the ACLU said in a statement.
“The new court filing comes after ACLU negotiations with the Biden administration reached an impasse because the Department of Defense has failed to take actions necessary to fix the issues faced by service members.”
In June, the Pentagon under President Joe Biden released a memo stating its intention to rescind the Trump administration policy, pending a review.
But the ACLU says the military continues to enforce it, claiming that at four of the five Army basic training bases, soldiers are still told they need to complete the minimum service requirements before filing their naturalization paperwork. In the filing, the ACLU also argues service members have been waiting for months, defying the 30-day court requirement.
A spokesperson for the Department of Army said they do not comment on ongoing litigation.
A Pentagon spokesperson said the Department of Defense is complying with the court order.
“Since we are still in litigation on this issue, we are not able to comment further on this matter,” Maj. César Santiago said.
Santiago referred questions about how many people have used the expedited path to citizenship to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. The agency’s website reports that since 2002 the U.S. has naturalized more than 139,000 members of the U.S. military, including more than 4,500 in fiscal year 2020.
USCIS reports that military naturalizations decreased after the Military Accessions Vital to National Interest program, which allowed the military to recruit certain non-citizens with specialized skills, was not renewed in September 2017.
Advocates for the expedited path to citizenship argue that service members without U.S. citizenship can be at risk when deploying abroad because they cannot travel with a U.S. passport, and that they can be excluded from professional advancement opportunities because many positions are only available to U.S. citizens.
The ACLU says that more than 100,000 individuals have used the expedited path to citizenship through military service since the Sept. 11 attacks.
“Our clients are deeply dismayed that the Pentagon continues to block military service members’ path to citizenship in direct defiance of the court’s order and in violation of federal law,” Scarlet Kim, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project, said in a statement.
“We’ve repeatedly presented the Pentagon with evidence of its non-compliance and proposed reasonable solutions, like identifying an official to assist service members whose chains of command refuse to help them obtain the military certification necessary for the citizenship process. Instead, the Pentagon has done virtually nothing and subjected service members to Kafkaesque ordeals that have further delayed their attempts to become U.S. citizens as Congress promised.”
Taliban fighters patrol in Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood in the city of Kabul, Afghanistan, Wednesday, Aug. 18, 2021. (photo: Rahmat Gul/AP)
A public display of dissent in the northeastern city of Jalalabad was met by force. Taliban soldiers fired into the crowd and beat protesters and journalists.
The Taliban had taken control of the city, a commercial hub east of Kabul near the main border crossing with Pakistan, four days earlier without much of a fight after a deal was negotiated with local leaders. This week, the Taliban have been out in large numbers, patrolling the city in pickup trucks seized from the now defunct police force.
The Biden administration is recommending booster doses for most Americans. (photo: CDC)
In a joint statement Wednesday, top administration health officials said people would need boosters beginning eight months after their second dose of either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine.
The officials include Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky, National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and acting Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Janet Woodcock.
"The available data make very clear that protection against SARS-CoV-2 infection begins to decrease over time following the initial doses of vaccination, and in association with the dominance of the Delta variant, we are starting to see evidence of reduced protection against mild and moderate disease," the officials said in the statement.
Administration of the boosters will begin Sept. 20. At that time, the individuals who were fully vaccinated earliest in the vaccination rollout, including many health care providers, nursing home residents and other seniors, will likely be eligible for a booster, the officials said.
Booster doses will also be delivered directly to residents of long-term care facilities.
"Based on our latest assessment, the current protection against severe disease, hospitalization, and death could diminish in the months ahead, especially among those who are at higher risk or were vaccinated during the earlier phases of the vaccination rollout. For that reason, we conclude that a booster shot will be needed to maximize vaccine-induced protection and prolong its durability," officials said.
The move is subject to an independent evaluation by the FDA to determine the safety and effectiveness of a third dose of the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines and CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices issuing booster dose recommendations "based on a thorough review of the evidence."
Officials said they anticipate booster shots will likely be needed for people who received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, but they are still examining the evidence, with more data expected in the coming weeks
Administration of the J&J vaccine did not begin in the U.S. until March, so boosters wouldn't be needed until November at the earliest.
The announcement represents a rapid and dramatic shift in policy for the administration, which for months has been trying to tamp down a push for booster doses. Officials have repeatedly said it was not clear whether boosters would be needed.
In July, the CDC and FDA put out a joint statement that pushed back after Pfizer suggested booster shots.
“Americans who have been fully vaccinated do not need a booster shot at this time," the agencies said.
But the messaging has softened in recent days. Last week, Fauci, the White House chief medical adviser, said it was “likely” everyone will need a coronavirus booster at some point.
The decision to provide boosters has significant implications domestically as well as abroad. Just more than 50 percent of Americans are fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, and while the pace of vaccinations has been increasing in recent weeks, millions are not vaccinated and have no interest in rolling up their sleeves.
Officials have tried to walk a fine line: They want to make sure the U.S. is prepared for any future COVID-19 complications while also prioritizing reaching the remaining unvaccinated.
The White House has also promised to be a world leader in donating the vaccine abroad, and officials Wednesday said that is not changing.
"I do not accept the idea that we have to choose between America and the world," Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said during a press briefing.
"We clearly see our responsibility to both, and that we've got to do everything we can to protect people here at home while recognizing that ending the pandemic across the world and getting people vaccinated is going to be key to preventing the rise of future variants," Murthy said.
Still, Murthy added that "when we see data that is giving us, essentially, indications that protection is starting to diminish ... we have to act."
Violent militia groups have become 'key' spreaders of vaccine misinformation on Facebook. (photo: Brooke Anderson)
iolent militia groups have become “key” spreaders of vaccine misinformation on Facebook, and now those groups are using the platform to boost their online followings and urge new followers to engage in violent, real-world protests.
These are the findings of a new report called “Facebook’s New Toxic Stew: Militia Groups and Vaccine Conspiracies” from the Tech Transparency Project (TTP), a nonprofit that aims to hold Big Tech accountable for its failings. The report was shared exclusively with VICE News ahead of its publication Tuesday.
By leveraging the fear and anxiety about COVID-19 and the pandemic, militia groups like the Three Percenters are reaching new audiences that would have had little or nothing to do with them before.
“You get the soccer mom who doesn’t see herself as a Three Percenter or maybe didn't think of herself as a ‘Stop the Steal’ person, but those moms are aggressive about protecting their kids from the vaccines, and so it's easy to loop in an entirely new audience,” Katie Paul, director of TTP, told VICE News.
And the social media giant has allowed the administrators of some of these organizations to obtain a “Group Expert” badge—a label the company says is designed to recognize “trusted, well-informed members.”
The admins of these groups are using their new titles to spread dangerous COVID-19 misinformation. They’re also boosting violent rhetoric about a coming vaccine war and spreading baseless conspiracy theories about Bill Gates.
Facebook rolled out its “Group Expert” label in April, while it was struggling to get a grip on widespread sharing of COVID-19 misinformation on the platform, something Paul says should not have happened:
“When it was rolled out in April of this year, [Facebook] hadn't gotten a handle on the vaccine misinformation, the COVID misinformation, the election misinformation, and yet they're creating these new tools that they have to imagine are going to be used by nefarious actors inappropriately. So while failing to address their problems they're adding in new tools to make those problems worse.”
And the result could be lethal, Paul said. “Passing off vaccine misinformation as expertise is something that can literally kill people.”
TTP did not share its findings with Facebook ahead of the report’s publication, and the social media company told VICE News that it could not comment on the findings in detail without first seeing the report.
But Facebook spokesperson Drew Pusateri told VICE News the company had removed tens of millions of pieces of misinformation on the platform, which he said had contributed to the fact that “for people in the U.S. on Facebook, vaccine hesitancy has declined by 50% since January, and acceptance is high.”
Groups that call themselves militias are not automatically banned from Facebook, but Pusateri said the company has banned more than 890 of these organizations to date, removing almost 20,000 Facebook groups in the process.
Paul said TTP did not share the details of their report with Facebook because “we're not here to be their free content moderators,” pointing out that when TTP shared details of previous reports with them the company failed to act on the information they contained.
To highlight the findings of the new report, consumer activist group SumOfUs placed life-sized cutouts of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg, dressed in full camo gear and standing next to life-sized cutouts of militia members, outside the company’s headquarters on Tuesday morning.
The trend of far-right extremist groups looking to capitalize on the chaos created by the pandemic emerged last year when the Boogaloo Bois started to use lockdowns as a way to get people involved in fighting so-called government tyranny.
Today the militia groups are focusing more on mask mandates and vaccine mandates being introduced across the country. Rather than just posting misinformation about these perceived threats online, these militia groups are openly urging their new followers to take up arms against those in authority.
“If there is a national vaccine mandate of some sort, we will see violence, because that's exactly what these people are protesting against,” Paul said.
And it’s happening already. Last month, the militia group “Idaho Liberty Dogs” promoted a July 15 rally at the Boise Capitol against vaccine mandates for healthcare workers, with a flyer saying, “WE ALL HAVE A CHOICE! #STOPTHEMANDATE.” The rally drew hundreds of people.
And just last weekend, a protest outside Los Angeles City Hall against COVID-19 vaccine requirements was attended by members of the Proud Boys. The protest became violent, and one person was stabbed.
One of the biggest groups being tracked by the TTP is “US Freedom Fighters,” which has amassed over 4,500 members since it was started in late April. The group’s leaders make it clear that they believe a war between the vaccinated and unvaccinated is imminent.
“We need to prepare for what is lying ahead, which in most cases is looking like another civil war, and we need to start preparing for that,” the group’s about page states. “They are segregating us by vaccine vs no vaccine, mask and no mask… Eventually they will be introducing a vaccine passport in order for you to travel anywhere. You think it’s just going to stop there? If you are in this group you had better be prepared to actually have to do something! We aren't just sitting around being keyboard warriors!”
Those applying to join the group are asked a series of questions about how far they are willing to go to protect their freedom. As one question put it: “Are you willing to go full on as if your life depends on it? (which it does).”
Mexico is seeking to hold US gun manufacturers and distributors accountable for high levels of gun violence in the country, where legal firearm ownership is restricted (photo: Mario Rivera Alvarado/AP)
The Mexican government took the unprecedented step of filing a lawsuit against US-based gun manufacturers and distributors in an American court. Here’s what could happen.
Pacheco became a spokesperson for himself and 1,600 of his neighbours who fled their villages in the mountains of Guerrero state when a local group armed with hand grenades and firearms took over the territory for drug trafficking and other illegal activities.
Based on bullets found at the scene, some of the weapons wielded by the gang are believed to have been smuggled into Mexico from the United States.
The vast majority of the people displaced from Guerrero in November 2018 have never returned to their villages.
Some are scattered throughout Mexico, while many — like Pacheco — are now seeking asylum in the US due to the continuing threat posed by the gang that still occupies the area.
His story is just one example of how lax gun laws north of the border are fuelling violence in Mexico, which heavily restricts the sale and ownership of firearms.
“It has destabilised the country,” Pacheco told Al Jazeera of the guns that have poured into Mexico. He is currently living in temporary accommodations in the US while he waits for a decision on his asylum case.
Earlier this month, to help curtail the flow of illegal weapons, the Mexican government took the unprecedented step of filing a lawsuit against US-based gun manufacturers and distributors, alleging that their negligence has led to illegal arms trafficking into Mexico and fuelled violence and bloodshed.
Yet while the suit sends a powerful message, some contend it is unlikely to curtail the flow of illicit arms into Mexico.
Made in America, trafficked into Mexico
The lawsuit (PDF), which was filed in US federal district court in Massachusetts and is seeking $10bn in damages, takes aim at marquee brands in the US firearms business, including Smith & Wesson Brands; Barrett Firearms Manufacturing; Beretta USA; Beretta Holding; Century International Arms; Colt’s Manufacturing Company; Glock Inc; Glock Ges.m.b.H.; Sturm, Ruger and Company and gun supplier Witmer Public Safety Group, which does business as Interstate Arms.
The complaint contends that 70 to 90 percent of the guns recovered from crime scenes in Mexico were trafficked from the US, and that the majority of them were made by six US manufacturers: Smith & Wesson, Beretta, Century Arms, Colt’s, Glock and Ruger.
The complaint also highlights that “Mexico has one gun store in the entire nation and issues fewer than 50 gun permits per year” and claims that “a gun manufactured in the US is more likely to be used to murder a Mexican citizen (17,000 in 2019) than an American citizen (14,000 in 2019)”.
A report (PDF) by the US Government Accountability Office released in February examining Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) data found that 70 percent of firearms reported to have been recovered in Mexico from 2014 through 2018 and submitted for tracing were from the US.
“These guns are legally purchased in gun shops or shows, mainly by US citizens and/or legal residents,” Alan Zamayoa, an analyst with global risk consultancy Control Risks, told Al Jazeera. “Once acquired either by gun traffickers or single individuals, guns are sold to the criminal groups intending to cross them into Mexico.”
Zamayoa said “the easiest and cheapest way” to transport guns from the US to Mexico “is through illicit crossing points along the border” – indeed, in the opposite direction of drug smuggling routes.
Guns are also smuggled through legal international crossings, noted Zamayoa. This usually occurs in collusion with customs officials; arms also get across the border in pieces, with different people crossing with individual or specific parts, and “once all the smugglers and parts are in Mexico, they reassemble the guns,” he said.
Because the figures in the February report only represent the firearms submitted to the ATF by the office of Mexico’s federal attorney general, the actual number is likely higher.
For its part, Mexico’s government estimates that more than two million weapons have been illegally smuggled into the country from the US over the past decade. They have helped fuel a rising gun homicide rate, which reached 13 homicides per 100,000 people in 2020, according to Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography.
Using the courts
Mexico’s lawsuit against US gun manufacturers follows other grand gestures by the administration of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, also known as AMLO, to push back on its northern neighbour and signal a departure from the corruption and violence of its predecessors.
Indeed, from threatening to kick out the US Drug Enforcement Administration to accusing the US government of coup-mongering, grand gestures of Mexican sovereignty have become a hallmark of the AMLO administration.
“The Lopez Obrador administration seeks to refocus bilateral security cooperation on reducing homicides and reducing arms trafficking from the US, among other issues,” Stephanie Brewer, director for Mexico and migrant rights with the Washington Office on Latin America, a US-based think-tank, told Al Jazeera.
“The lawsuit comes in this context and sends a strong message on the importance that Mexico’s federal government attaches to this,” she added.
As Brewer observed, “This isn’t the first time that Mexico has signalled its interest in prioritising arms trafficking, but the current administration took this message to a new level.”
Mexico’s lawsuit could face a number of hurdles, chiefly the US’s Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which shields gun manufacturers from nearly all civil liability and blocks victims and their families from suing them.
“US legislation makes it very difficult to sue gun manufacturers for the violence inflicted with their weapons, so the lawsuit faces a tough path ahead,” Brewer said.
One of the gun manufacturers Mexico is suing, Glock Inc, has labelled the lawsuit “baseless” and promised to “vigorously” defend itself.
Sending a message
Zamayoa said that even if the ruling favours the Mexican government, it won’t be enough to have a tangible impact on gun trafficking volume.
“Rather than reducing gun violence, a potential successful lawsuit is likely to be reflected in a change in the way criminals get access to guns,” Zamayoa said.
“For example, criminals can become more involved in in-house gun production, or look for other markets outside the US to get their gun supply. Likewise, the theft of guns from security forces in Mexico can also increase,” he noted.
Still, Brewer said, “this lawsuit sends a strong message to the US on the importance of this issue to the Mexican government”, even if it does not succeed in court.
But, she added, it will also take reforms on the Mexican side to fully address the issue of gun violence in the country.
“Overall, the only real solution to Mexico’s criminal violence is through investigation and prosecution of criminal networks to reduce impunity and disrupt collusion and tolerance by state actors,” Brewer said, noting it is also necessary to have “professionalisation and accountability for Mexico’s police forces at all levels”.
A man attempts to extinguish the forest fires approaching the village of Pefki on Evia, Greece's second largest island, in August 2021. (photo: Angelos Tzortzinis/Getty)
he fires of 2020 seemed to be everywhere, a pyric pandemic.
Places that commonly burn, such as Australia, California, and Siberia, burned with epic breadth and intensity. Australia had established a historic standard for a single outbreak with its 2009 Black Saturday fires; its 2019–20 Black Summer burns broke historic standards for a season. California endured its fourth year of serial conflagrations, each surpassing the record set the season before. Like a plague, the fires spread across Oregon and Washington, and then leaped over the continental divide to scour the Colorado Rockies. Siberian fires moved north of their home territory and flared beyond the Arctic Circle. Places that naturally wouldn’t burn, or that would burn only in patches, were burning widely. The Pantanal wetlands in central South America burned. Amazonia had its worst fire season in 20 years.
What the fires’ flames didn’t touch, their smoke plumes did. Australia’s smoke circled the globe. The palls from the West Coast fires spread haze through the country; they struck with the symbolic impact and visual intensity that dust storms evoked during the 1930s. The fires’ smoke obscured subcontinents by day; their lights dappled continents at night, like a Milky Way of flame-stars. Where fires were not visible, the lights of cities and of gas flares were: combustion via the transubstantiation of coal and gas into electricity. To many observers, they appeared as the pilot flames of an advancing apocalypse. Even Greenland burned.
The smoke and flames of last year’s fire season were a symptom, not a syndrome. Now they are back, like a revived wave of COVID. Greece and Turkey have replaced Australia as this year’s ground zero. Evacuations by sea beneath red skies on Evia and Mugla echo those from Mallacoota a year before. The West Coast fires have moved north into British Columbia. Siberia burned at an even larger scale. Algeria burned. Outbreaks follow migrating heat domes. What didn’t dry, drowned or flooded after burning. Wetting and drying is the climatic rhythm behind landscape fire; as each phase intensified into drought and deluge, so fires swelled. Smoke flowed across continents, like dust storms on Mars. But such rolling insurgencies were only half the story.
The planet’s current unhinged pyrogeography has also been shaped by fires that should have been present and weren’t. These are the fires historically set by nature or people to which landscapes had adapted. Now those fires are mostly gone, and the land has responded by degrading ecologically while building up combustibles to stoke more savage wildfires. The Earth’s fire crisis, that is, is not just about the bad burns that trash countrysides and crash into towns. It is equally about the good fires that have vanished because they were extinguished or no longer lit. The Earth’s biota is disintegrating as much by tame fire’s absence as by feral fire’s outbreaks.
There is a third facet to this planetary fire triangle, one that looks beyond present and absent fires to deep time. Its combustibles come not from living biomass, but from lithic ones. With increasing frenzy, humans are binge-burning fossil fuels. They are taking fuel out of the geologic past, burning it in the present with complex (and little understood) interactions, and then releasing the effluent into the geologic future. Industrial combustion has restructured the dynamics of fire on Earth. Fossil fuel combustion acts as an enabler, as a performance enhancer, and by its disrupting effects on the atmosphere as a globalizer. It has ensured that little of the Earth will be untouched by fire’s reach if not its grasp.
The dialectic between burning living and lithic landscapes explains most of the paradoxes of Earth’s current fire scene. The first is that the more we try to remove fire from places that have co-evolved with it, the more violently fire will return. Without the counterforce provided by petrol-powered machines, from helicopters to portable pumps, there could have been no serious effort to exclude fire in the first place. Second, while wildfires gather more and more media attention, the amount of land actually burned overall is shrinking. Fossil fuel societies find surrogates for fire and remove it (or suppress it) from landscapes. California experienced 4.2 million burned acres in 2020; in pre-industrial times, it would have known perhaps 15 million to 20 million acres burned, though not in wild surges. Fire would have resembled irrigated fields, not sprawling floods. The third paradox is that as we ratchet down fossil fuel burning, we’ll have to ratchet up our burning of living landscapes. We have a fire deficit. We have many landscapes ill-adapted to what they are experiencing. We need to make firescapes more robust against what is coming, and fire is the surest way to do it.
Add up all these fire influences — those directly through flame, those indirectly through smoke, removed fire, fire-enabled land use, and a warming climate — and you have the contours of a planetary fire age, the fire-informed equivalent of an ice age. You have a Pyrocene.
The Pyrocene proposes a fire-centric perspective on how humans continue to shape the Earth. It renames and redefines the Anthropocene according to humanity’s primary ecological signature, which is our ability to manipulate fire. It comes with a narrative — the long alliance between fire and humans. It proposes an analogy for the future — the sum of our fire practices is creating a fire age that is equivalent in stature to the ice ages of the Pleistocene. With fire as a theme, it offers a sideways view on climate change, continental scale shifts in biogeography, the sixth extinction, changes in ocean chemistry and sea level, and the character of the human presence on Earth. Like fire, the Pyrocene integrates its surroundings — geographic, historical, institutional, intellectual.
The history it tells chronicles three fires. The first is the fire of nature—fires that had appeared as soon as plants colonized continents and have remained ever since. Fossilized charcoal traces their presence back 420 million years. A second is the fire set and abetted by humans. Thanks to cooking, a dependence on fire had become coded into hominin DNA; thanks to favorable conditions at the end of the last ice age, this expression of fire has steadily spread everywhere humans have. Together, people and fire have competed with nature’s fire and expanded the overall domain of burning such that very little of terrestrial Earth — places blanketed by ice, implacable deserts, sodden rainforests — lack fire. Still, human-kindled fires burned as nature’s did, in living landscapes, subject to shared conditions and constraints. The third fire to appear is qualitatively different.
These fires burn lithic landscapes no longer bounded by such ecological limits as fuel, season, sun, or the cadence of wetting and drying. The source of combustibles is essentially unbounded; the problem is the sinks, where to put all the effluent. This third fire has unsettled not only climate and biotas, but the affinity between people and fire. Second (anthropogenic) fire was an act of domestication, perhaps the model for domesticating, in which people had transformed wild fire into hearth and torch just as they had cultivated teosinte into maize, and aurochs into dairy cows. Both fire and people spread in a kind of mutual-assistance pact. There was a fundamental inequality in their relationship because fire could exist without humans while humans could not exist without fire. But both nature’s fires and humanity’s operated within a shared set of bounded conditions.
The third fire — industrial combustion — has decoupled that relationship. People can thrive without it, but it cannot flourish without people. It is about power; not using the power of fire to nudge, leverage, integrate, and quicken within living landscapes, but the brute force of fire distilled and mechanized. The second fire was a kind of mutual taming, a partnership. It helped create habitats more suitable for humanity, what the ancients called a ‘second nature.’ The third fire is just a tool, like a factory farm for combustion. It generates raw power. With it, humanity is fashioning a third nature, one that threatens to make the Earth progressively uninhabitable for its creators.
Nature’s fire has existed since plants colonized continents, some 420 million years ago. Anthropogenic fire has existed in some form for most of the Pleistocene, probably 2 million years or more, though it became a growing planetary presence across the Holocene, the last 10,000 years. It complemented and competed with nature’s fire. Initially, over the past two centuries, industrial combustion competed as well by seeking technological substitutes where possible and otherwise suppressing open fire wherever possible. Now, thanks to how it has restructured landscapes and unmoored climate, third fire is colluding with the others.
Over the last century, the terms of these interactions have changed. Something flipped. In unprecedented ways the Earth had too much bad fire, too little good fire, and too much combustion overall. It was not simply fire’s indirect relationship to climate that was upset: the whole of fire’s presence on Earth was deranged. The sum of humanity’s fire practices have overwhelmed the existing arrangement of ecological baffles and barriers. Fire is creating the conditions for more fire.
Since the onset of the last interglacial, we have systematically driven off the relics of the ice ages and fashioned, piece by piece, a more fire-friendly world that has yielded a fire-informed one. Propagating ice previously helped push the planet into an ice age; so likewise our binge burning is now propelling the Earth into a fire age.
We have created a Pyrocene. Now we have to live in it.
So what does a full-blown fire age look like, and can we adapt?
In the near term, the future will likely resemble today’s pyrogeography, but enhanced. Places that have fire now are likely to experience it more frequently and more intensely. Places that have little fire now may acquire it, depending on how climatic shifts interact with what people do. Slashing rainforest, draining peatland, abandoning cultivated fields – all can make biomass more susceptible to fire-favoring weather.
So long as the conditions that prevailed before a fire persist, fire will renew the scene and the old order will return. But if new species have come or old ones gone, if the weather sharpens its rhythms of wetting and drying, if land is cleared or drained or subject to grazing, then fire will catalyze a new arrangement. Probably it will be one more prone to fire, but a different kind of fire, as forests may shrink to shrublands, or scrub to grass, or prairie is overrun with woods. Fire is infinitely adaptable: It will synthesize whatever those new surroundings become. The issue is whether humanity can be equally adaptable.
In simple terms, I imagine three hierarchies of responses. They have different scales and timetables of implementation but we need to do them all concurrently. In truth, we should have begun them 40 years ago.
First, limit the damage to communities and critical assets from wildfire. Most fires (97 percent) around inhabited areas start from people — no surprise. In principle, nearly all these ignitions can be eliminated or their threat dampened by removing their power to propagate at strength. Many megafires have begun from powerline failures in high winds; these have technical fixes. Others, such as those from abandoned camp or signal fires, can be significantly reduced with enough effort.
We know how to protect towns and exurbs from burning. Most ignitions result from ember blizzards that attack points of vulnerability — imagine a swarm of fire-kindling locusts. We don’t have to rebuild towns from scratch, just fix those critical weaknesses. Many of these concerns involve infrastructure and land use — issues we’ve recognized for decades that we need to address. We need to add fire to the mix. The know-how and tools exist. If we are serious, we can resolve many of the threats within a handful of years.
An intermediate suite of responses addresses fire in living landscapes, something humans have done all our existence as a species. We can leave fire to nature. We can substitute our fires for nature’s. We can alter the fuels that power any and all fires. We can try to exclude fire altogether.
Leave it to nature. There are plenty of places for which fire is necessary as well as inevitable. It makes sense to monitor or loose-herd such fires — let them do the ecological work the land needs while keeping them within borders that don’t threaten human settlements. Remote areas and many nature reserves fall within this realm. Fire management in Alaska has long targeted point protection (keeping fire out of villages and towns) while burning out from secure perimeters such as rivers that box in fires and their smoke.
It’s not easy, and it involves a mindset alien to urbanites. In a city, every fire put out is a problem solved. In fire-prone landscapes, most fires put out are problems put off. We can’t, and shouldn’t want to, eliminate fire in the countryside as we can in the built-environment.
Substitute our fires for nature’s. The control of fire has long been at the core of human identity. We got small guts and big heads because we learned to cook food. We went to the top of the food chain because we learned to cook landscapes. Now we have become a geologic force because we’ve begun to cook the planet. Using fire is our ecological signature.
The trick is getting it right. Fire takes on the character of its context. A candle or cooking fire is mostly under our control because we created the fuels and designed the site where it burns. But in landscapes arranged by wind, mountains, gorges, and complex assemblages of vegetation there is little we govern. In true wildlands prescribed fire can be akin to training a grizzly bear to dance.
Yet humans have done it successfully for all our existence. A good fire culture codes the needed behavior into stories, seasonal migration routes, rites, as well as software and legal prescriptions. Oddly, by extinguishing traditional knowledge, modern science destroyed much of the basis for controlled fire in landscapes, and has not yet been able to replace that lost knowledge fast enough or fully enough.
For the past 50 years America’s federal fire agencies have operated under a policy that has sought to prevent bad fires while promoting good ones. The prescribed fire has served as the compromise between those who sought to ban all burning and those who demanded the right to burn anywhere anytime. The policy is new, but the concept is ancient, and in fact, predates our species. (After all, from Erectines to Neanderthals, hominins could also manipulate fire.)
Change fire’s setting. Unlike hurricanes or earthquakes, which can occur without a particle of life present, fire is a creation of the living world and feeds off biomass. No fuel, no fire. The ability to determine where and when to kindle a fire is an enormous power, but controlled fire is still constrained by the capacity of the environment to allow it to spread. By cutting, draining, loosing livestock, and so on, people can expand the seasons and settings for fire. They can kindle it where and when it would not burn on its own.
This is, in fact, the basis for most agriculture, and it is how places like Mediterranean Europe, with its notoriously fire-prone environment, prevented wildfire from overrunning human settlement. When such lands are abandoned (as they have been for several decades), wildfires return. Portugal and Greece have experienced this scenario for years; this year it has played out in Sardinia, Italy, and Turkey. Similarly, well before global warming made itself felt, America was swept by a century of megafires that gorged on the slash left by logging and land-clearing. Controlling the axe helped end those serial conflagrations.
‘Land management,’ however, can be a loaded term, easily hijacked to promote agendas that have little to do with fire, further animated by the visceral fears that free-running fire can instill. It can mean lessening landclearing in places like Amazonia where large-area fires are converting rainforest to pasture. It can mean finding modern equivalents to traditional agriculture in Italy, Spain, and the Balkans. It can mean managing to promote ecological goods and services in parks and protected reserves.
Suppress fire. There are places where fire is unnatural and unwanted. Historically, towns burned along with their surroundings since they were made of the same materials and subject to the same winds and droughts. But modern cities broke that old cycle; conflagrations became rare, and occurred typically only when simultaneously subject to earthquakes, riots, or wars.
In the past few decades, throughout the industrialized world, urban sprawl has recolonized what had been rural settings or pushed buildings against the borders of public lands. Mostly, those sites have been considered as wildlands (or countryside) with houses rather than exurban enclaves with peculiar landscaping, so the practices that kept fire out of cities were ignored, and fire is returning. Keeping fire out of those communities makes sense. Keeping it out of their surroundings often doesn’t because it only allows conditions to deteriorate and fuels to stockpile.
Few places will be satisfied with only one strategy; most will require a cocktail of treatments, adjusted to the particulars of place. Fire is interactive, a full-spectrum ecological catalyst, and a reaction that varies according to the small as well as the large features of its setting. It requires relentless tinkering, and its alliance with humanity continual negotiation. It is not a once-and-done vaccination. We will be burning in perpetuity.
All these mitigations will fail unless we end the burning of fossil fuels. That is the deep, destabilizing presence, and so long as it continues (or in its current state, accelerates), efforts to ameliorate its effects will falter. Yet as the most recent IPCC report emphasizes, global warming is already baked into the planet for decades, perhaps centuries. Moreover, even replacing combustion as an energy source with sun and wind will still leave the structures that a fossil-fuel civilization created. We will still have exurbs at risk from fire; landscapes both slashed and uncultivated and prone to blowups; and biotas starved for the right kind of burning.
Our maturing fire age isn’t just about fossil-fuel powered climate change since land use contributes in equally significant ways. But the pyric pandemic is mostly about fossil fuels because they supply the power that underwrites land use in industrialized societies. They have made possible how we live on the land and relate to fire. We will be coping with the legacy of industrial combustion for a long time. Stripping away the overlay of lithic landscapes will still leave us with fire-prone living landscapes famished for the flames our addiction to fossil fuels tried to remove.
What we have made, even with all its unanticipated consequences, we can unmake, even accepting more unanticipated consequences. But however the Pyrocene evolves, we have a lot of fire in our future.
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