My own contribution, the distilled musings of a lifelong pyromantic, is to track how the mutual-assistance pact between fire and humanity has reshaped the Earth.

To those observers who say our planetary future is so strange that we have no narrative by which to connect that future to our familiar past and no analogue by which to guide our response, I reply that we have both. The narrative is the unbroken saga of humanity and fire. The analogue is the recognition that humanity’s fire practices are creating the fire equivalent of an ice age, what I think of as the Pyrocene.

All the commanding features of an ice age — climate upheaval, changes in ocean chemistry and sea level, mass extinctions, biogeographic migrations — map nicely onto our fire-catalyzed present. There is a fundamental difference in that ice is a substance, and fire a reaction: fire analogues can be faster and more transient, such as smoke palls instead of outwash plains and heat domes in place of proglacial lakes. But it is as though the last glaciation has passed through a pyric looking-glass and exchanged fire for ice.

It is said that all models (and metaphors) fail, though some are useful. The Pyrocene offers a way to imagine the variety and scale of an Anthropocene informed by fire. We created a world more favourable to fire, which was a world favourable to us, until greed and power-lust pushed our combustion habits beyond the elastic limits of living landscapes and transformed our best friend into our worst enemy.

These transformations Canada, a carbon superpower, will feel profoundly. The Pyrocene is coming with the scale and power of the Laurentian ice sheet. Our response will have to match it. We are well beyond learning to live with fire. We have to live with a fire age.

The causes behind this planetary make-over are many. People have long used their unique firepower to fashion out of raw nature what Cicero famously termed a “second nature,” and have pushed species to extinction and nudged the global climate.

But by exhuming en masse both matter and fuel from the geologic past and marbling and overloading the present with its products, from plastics to power plants, we have crafted a third nature beyond the ecological bounds of living landscapes. It’s as though we are creating a Jurassic Park for fire.

Paradoxes abound. One is that in naturally fire-prone landscapes, the removal of fire either by suppression or technological substitution makes the scene more susceptible to wildfires. Instead of better control, we have unleashed a pandemic of combustion. A second is that the most developed countries (which in practical terms has meant those that have most exploited fossil biomass) are those with the worst megafires. Fire synthesizes its surroundings: megafires are a pathology, and cipher, of modernity.

On the Canadian Red River Exploring Expedition of 1857, Henry Hind observed of a massive fire that “It is like a volcano in full activity; you cannot imitate it, because it is impossible to obtain those gigantic elements from which it derives its awful splendour.”

We still can’t control those elements, though we have managed to disrupt them and have boosted their power. That’s the awful splendour of our own times.

Stephen J. Pyne is an emeritus professor at Arizona State University and one of the world’s foremost chroniclers of the cultural and environmental history of fire. He has published a series of fire histories, including Awful Spendour: A Fire History of Canada.