We call ourselves "wise humans", homo sapiens. This is the mother of all misnomers. A better name for us is homo flagrans, burning humans. That's what the geologic record is going to reveal about our legacy in the eons to come, as a runaway, reckless species that upturned Earth materials and burned the atmosphere to hell, causing the sixth mass extinction- the only such mass extinction caused by a single species- by regurgitating as many greenhouse gases as the freakish Siberian super volcanoes during the Permian extinction 250 million years ago.
I came across this term in John Valliant's frightening book "Fire Weather", which he apparently coined. It made me laugh out loud: probably the only time in a book of such despair. Fire weather is a new phenomenon in meteorology that began at the turn of the century, when humans cranked up the thermostat and showed little collective interest in turning it down. The forest will burn until the sky is opaque, as if we, the incinerators of all materials, were the worst volcanic eruption ever seen. Because that is all we do geologically- burn shit. We are the Earth's first species that flourishes on fire. Homo flagrans, ha, that's what we are.
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