Image by me. Hand-drawn and then photo-filtered, NOT AI.

For some time, my body has felt a visceral judder of injustice whenever the word “wildfire” is used across our ever-increasing media of meaninglessness (lately, every time I switch on my TV, radio, or social media apps).

Like my neologism esranebula/esranebulous ~ the eerie blood-coloured ghostlight of the Anthropocene seeping from inter-continental crematoria smoke clouds ~ I think our English lexical simulacra could ironically do with shots of hyper-reality (see Baudrillard).

In a new word, or term, I want to bring the lethality of unseasonal or uncontrollable fire to mind instead of a celebratory evolutionary modulator. “Wild” is also broad, semantically (a bit like “love”), and “fire” is not always cataclysmic; beyond a fireplace or campfire, escapable, survivable controlled burns (a true craft, and learned through generations) have proved to be an ancient place-based method of preventing thermal runaway and ignition of vegetative matter.

See the global scale of the anthropogenic cellular-burn that LiFE is experiencing right now.

I thought about ash, breath, souls, and screams (imagine those collective screams). Ashanaman was my first idea, derived from a proto-Celtic “burning of souls”. But I felt it tripped off the tongue too easily; perhaps too spiritually loaded; reflecting no hardship.

Pyre is funereal. Cataclysm is expansive.

“Pyroclysm” alone may not point the finger of blame. Massive “floods” of fire have flowed from past formations of large igneous provinces, major meteor strikes, or supercell lightning swarms, though increases in the latter may also be attributed to human-induced climate surgence.

Using “andro” as the modulator in a hyphenated compound serves to nail general causation – collective human behaviour (hierarchies of power aside). Humans are deliberate or accidental incendiaries, either by storing spontaneously combustible materials in bulk or igniting by match or broken glass.

Critically, of course, our species is the catalyst for rapid global heating/ice-melts by persistent selfish cultures of burning fossil fuels and emitting greenhouse gases.

So, to the catastrophic loss of trillionitudes of LiFE on land by anthropogenic fire, I offer “andro-pyroclysm.

Perhaps, Andro-Pyromundi could be deployed as part of a wider Earth Crisis; precursor to a planetary extinction event? “Pyrocene” coined by Stephen J Pyne implies that geological epoch of Flame Earth as opposed to Snowball Earth – perhaps colossal sea rises from polar ice melts will put that idea to bed (I just don’t know).

The blaze across the horizon began to create its own weather system, and all the screams fell silent. Airborne embers were bone-lignin-chitin, and the ash crossed oceans. This was never a flame gone feral; this was an andro-pyroclysm.”

Perhaps the term doesn’t conjure the gargantuan micro-macro pain, death, and grief involved across all species of a burning floloca, but could I cope with that kind of responsibility? The reality is about as bleak as it can get ~ hell-like.

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