Thinking with Fire: Geontological Disruptions in the Situated Pyrocene

This article responds to Anthropocene debates by developing a situated account of the Pyrocene as a way of thinking ecological crisis through combustion, flammability, and the uneven relations that make wildfire both event and condition. Rather than treating the Pyrocene as a singular epochal break, it is approached here as a cumulative planetary condition that sediments differently across places, histories, and infrastructures. Drawing on geontological, feminist STS, and more-than-human approaches, the article argues that fire is best understood not as an object but as an emergent, relational process shaped by the intra-action of fuels, atmosphere, land use, labour, memory, governance, and infrastructural design. Through examples from Britain and Portugal, it traces how suppression orthodoxy, plantation ecologies, rural abandonment, and climate volatility have assembled contemporary fire regimes, while also suggesting that wildfire can be read as a political archive of governance, erasure, and unequal exposure. The Pyrocene, in this formulation, is both diagnosis and method: a way of reading flammable landscapes and of asking how their relations might be repaired and remade.