Thanks to the relentless burning of fossil fuels, we are — right now, in real time — departing the Holocene epoch, the Goldilocks zone of relative climate stability that enabled us to build the world as we know it over the past 12,000 years. We must recognize this moment for what it is: the beginning of a new era of civilizational retreat, contraction and consolidation. Call it the post-Holocene.

For context, wildfire has been quite rare in the northeast US for the past few hundred years.