Burning Down the House

In order to change our collective future, we have to change the names we use to describe the present.

The Pyrocene Has Arrived

When I reread my recent essay, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It,” I noticed something about the language: I had used the present continuous tense repeatedly. The climate is changing. The Pyrocene is arriving. The world we have known is becoming something else.

There's something reassuring about that tense. It describes a process that is underway. Something is happening, but it hasn't happened yet. We are suspended between the world we inherited and the world that is coming. However, I no longer think that tense is adequate. Instead, let's use the present perfect: The climate has changed. The Pyrocene has arrived.

We are in it now. Get used to it.

That may sound unnecessarily bleak, but I have a specific meaning in mind. I'm not suggesting that we surrender to climate change. I don't mean that mitigation no longer matters. I certainly don't mean that the future has already been determined. What I mean is that we need to recognize where we are.

For decades, climate change was presented primarily as a warning about the future. Scientists told us what would happen if greenhouse gas concentrations continued to rise. Temperatures would increase. Glaciers and ice sheets would melt. Sea levels would rise. Heat waves would intensify. Conditions favorable to extreme wildfire would become more common. In short, if we continue as we are, dangerous things will happen.

We continued. And now many of those things are happening. The warning was about the future. The predicament is about the present.

Confirmation of that shift arrived as I was writing this essay. On September 2, 2026, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) released a report with an unusually stark conclusion: exceeding 1.5°C of global warming is now widely assessed as unavoidable. The question is no longer simply how to prevent the world from crossing that threshold. Instead, UNEP now speaks of an “overshoot, peak and decline” pathway: limiting how far temperatures rise above 1.5°C, limiting how long they remain there, and adapting to the consequences, with the eventual goal of bringing temperatures back down.

The 1.5°C threshold was one of the great warning markers of the climate-change era. Now the United Nations has told us to prepare for a different kind of world. The future we were warned about has become the condition from which the future must now be made.

The name we have traditionally given this predicament is climate change. It is an extraordinarily bloodless expression. After all, climate changes all the time. Seasons change. Weather changes. Temperatures rise and fall. The words climate change themselves do not convey danger.

Even global warming has an oddly gentle quality. Warmth is something we normally seek. We warm ourselves beside fireplaces. We travel to warm places during the winter. But there is another name for this new world. Fire historian Stephen J. Pyne calls it the Pyrocene – the Age of Fire.

That lands differently. People don't need scientific training to understand fire. Fire burns skin, destroys homes, and kills. Increasingly, fire reveals what would otherwise remain dispersed across atmospheric measurements, carbon concentrations, temperature anomalies, vapor pressure deficits, and climate models. Fire transforms difficult-to-see relationships and turns them into flame.

Therefore, the Pyrocene should not be understood simply as "the age of wildfires." While wildfire is its most spectacular manifestation, something larger is occurring. The Pyrocene is characterized by the accelerating relationship between the atmosphere, carbon, vegetation, climate, technology, and human institutions. At the center of this relationship lies fast combustion. In particular, the exponential rise in industrial combustion, what Pyne refers to as the third fire.

For several centuries, industrial civilization performed an astonishing trick. We extracted ancient carbon from beneath the Earth's surface and burned it inside engines, furnaces, and power plants. We domesticated fire. Or at least we thought we did. Turn the key. Open the valve. Ignite the burner. Stop the engine. Fire became our servant.

While we controlled internal combustion, we progressively lost control of the conditions surrounding the flame. The byproducts of combustion did not simply disappear. Carbon dioxide accumulated in the atmosphere. The controlled combustion began altering the conditions of the uncontrolled combustion.

The genie escaped the bottle.

The Monster

Perhaps that is why I can't stop thinking about another metaphor. A monster has arrived. Not literally, of course. Climate change and fire are not creatures. However, monsters have always allowed us to give narrative form to frightening forces that exceed the ordinary human scale. This particular monster has an unusual characteristic, though: it is a shapeshifter.

Fire has no single form. Depending on the configuration of fuel, moisture, wind, and atmosphere, it can creep along the forest floor. Change those conditions, however, and it races through grass. Change the conditions again, and it climbs into the canopy. Under extreme conditions, wildfires can exhibit firestorm behavior, generating enormous convective columns and producing pyrocumulonimbus clouds that can transport smoke and embers high into the atmosphere.

The monster changes because the field changes. There is no single entity underlying all these manifestations of fire with one immutable identity. It is fundamentally a chemical process. The form that fire takes emerges through its relationships with fuel, terrain, moisture, wind, vegetation, infrastructure, and atmosphere.

The monster has no name because the monster has no single form. Instead, we have named the age in which it appears – our time now – the Pyrocene, the Age of Fire.

That is frightening. It should be.

We are adapting to a moving target, and there is growing evidence that the target itself is shifting more quickly. In geological terms, Earth remains an icehouse planet, characterized by large, permanent polar ice sheets. Human civilization arose during an unusually stable period within this icehouse world. Yet, we are now rapidly pushing the climate away from these familiar conditions toward a much warmer planetary state.

We should be careful here. A full-geological-greenhouse Earth is not a predetermined destination awaiting us at the end of this century. Where we end up depends substantially on what we do next. However, this should not distract from what has happened: we have placed ourselves on a warming trajectory, moving away from the climatic regime in which our civilizations, agricultural systems, coastlines, and infrastructure developed. There are also increasingly strong indications that the climate changes along this trajectory are accelerating.

The evidence is not based on a single unusually hot year. In fact, a recent paper published in Geophysical Research Letters found that the planet has been warming at its fastest rate on record over the past decade. The authors noted that the world has been warming at a rate of approximately 0.2°C per decade since the 1970s but has "accelerated" since 2015 to a rate of 0.35°C per decade. While some of this acceleration may be due to natural variability over short periods, other physical measurements point in the same direction.

One of the most important measurements is the Earth's energy imbalance, which is the difference between the solar energy the planet absorbs and the heat it radiates back into space. Data from NASA's Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) satellites show that the imbalance nearly doubled from the early 2000s to the 2020s. Specifically, the planet has been trapping heat at a rate exceeding 1.0 W/m², compared to 0.5–0.6 W/m² in the early 2000s. In short, the Earth is accumulating excess thermal energy significantly faster than in previous decades.

Most of the excess heat does not remain in the atmosphere. Instead, it enters the oceans. More than 90 percent of the excess energy accumulating in the climate system is absorbed by the oceans, which makes ocean heat an especially important measure of long-term planetary warming.

Looking back, the oceans gained heat roughly twice as fast during the 2010s and 2020s as they did during the 1980s and 1990s, reflecting the Earth’s increasing energy imbalance. Recent years have witnessed the largest single-year heat gains on record, providing another indication that the accumulation of energy continues beneath the noisy year-to-year fluctuations of surface weather. To make matters worse, we are currently experiencing the onset of a historic El Niño event.

The United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization (WMO) underscored the point, issuing an urgent global warning about the phenomenon’s impact. In response, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres cautioned that "El Niño is being supersized before our eyes," and warned that the combined effects of climate change and ocean warming have pushed the planet into "uncharted waters" and the "danger zone of extreme weather."

At the same time, one of the forces that had previously concealed some greenhouse warming has weakened. Industrial sulfate aerosols reflect sunlight and alter clouds, producing a temporary cooling effect that masks some of the warming generated by greenhouse gases. But reductions in sulfate aerosols have eliminated much of this cooling effect.

The cryosphere is also responding. Ice sheets and mountain glaciers are losing mass, and terrestrial seasonal snow cover is retreating earlier across North America and Eurasia. Remember that sea ice and snow cover act as giant planetary mirrors. Fresh snow reflects 80 to 90 percent of incoming solar radiation back into space, whereas open, dark ocean water absorbs about 90 percent of that same solar energy.

Arctic sea ice has exhibited the most significant and consistent long-term reduction of any oceanic ice cover. Since satellite records began in 1979, summer minimum extent (measured each September) has declined by roughly 12% to 13% per decade. Additionally, winter ice expansion around Antarctica has suffered persistent anomalies, regularly falling 1.5 to 2 million square kilometers below historical averages. Over the past century, glaciers in the European Alps, the tropical Andes, western North America, and high mountain Asia have lost an estimated 20% to 40% of their total area.

In brief, surface temperature, ocean heat, planetary energy imbalance, melting ice and reduced snow cover are all manifestations of one underlying fact: the Earth is accumulating energy. The consequences of this accumulation are spreading throughout the planetary system.

Importantly, we have not transitioned from one stable climate to another. Rather, we are moving along a trajectory. Today's extraordinary event may become tomorrow's reference point, and tomorrow's extraordinary event may lie beyond that.

As a result, the Pyrocene is not a destination at which we have arrived. It is a trajectory we have entered – and there is ample evidence that we are accelerating along it.

We know enough to understand the direction of the trajectory, but not exactly where it leads. How much warming will ultimately occur? How will particular ecosystems respond? Which thresholds will be crossed? We don't know.

That uncertainty is not reassuring. The monster has arrived, but it has not reached its final form.

The Monster Feeds On What We Burn

The monster metaphor is particularly useful here because recognizing that we are living in the Pyrocene could lead to the wrong conclusion. If the climate has already changed, why bother doing anything?

Because the monster is getting bigger.

Carbon dioxide accumulates. Therefore, what matters for long-term warming is not simply the emissions produced in any particular year, but rather, the cumulative amount added to the atmosphere over time. Each additional quantity of fossil carbon that we extract and burn adds to that cumulative burden. The predicament has arrived, but its eventual magnitude has not yet been determined.

The monster feeds on what we continue to burn.

For decades, much of the discussion about climate change has revolved around net zero. From a scientific perspective, this concept is extremely important. In order to stop contributing to CO₂-induced warming, humanity must eventually reach a point at which anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions are balanced by anthropogenic removals. Net zero describes that balance.

However, when the term "net" leaves the realm of climate science and enters the world of politics and the public imagination, it can become problematic. When the solution is seen as something in the future, it becomes tempting to imagine that we can continue emitting enormous quantities of carbon today and compensate for them tomorrow through forests, carbon capture, direct air capture, or other technologies that have yet to operate at anything close to the required scale.

That is an extraordinarily dangerous wager to make with the atmosphere.

If our objective has shifted from preventing climate change to mitigating the effects of an ongoing climatic transformation, then another principle should accompany net zero. Call it real zero.

To put this in perspective, absolute zero is neither possible nor desirable. Agriculture, industrial processes, and other activities will produce residual emissions that are extraordinarily difficult to eliminate. Therefore, carbon removal will have a role. Still, the goal should be to reduce gross fossil fuel emissions to the minimum that cannot be avoided rather than assuming that large-scale future carbon removal will allow us to continue extracting and burning carbon now.

Net zero tells us where the balance must eventually lie. Real zero shows us the direction in which fossil fuel combustion must travel: downward toward the minimum we can possibly achieve.

This means leaving more and more fossil carbon underground, where it was originally deposited by geological processes.

This distinction matters because every ton of coal we don't burn means we don't have to remove that same amount from the atmosphere later. Each coal seam left untouched, each barrel of oil that does not combust, and each quantity of fossil gas that is replaced by non-carbon energy represents carbon that never enters the active atmospheric cycle.

Mitigation therefore takes on a different meaning once we understand ourselves as inhabitants of the Pyrocene. It is no longer just about solving a future problem. Rather, it is about altering the trajectory of our current predicament.

Or, in the language of our monster story: let’s stop feeding the monster.

Our Time Now

We were warned. For decades, scientists have described the eventual effects of continued greenhouse gas emissions on the planet. We did not respond adequately. The climate changed. The Pyrocene era has arrived. Now, the monster is here.

The United Nations' latest assessment makes it difficult to avoid acknowledging the change in our circumstances. The world is now expected to surpass the 1.5°C threshold that we spent years trying to avoid crossing. The remaining task is to limit how far above the threshold we go, how long we remain there, and the amount of damage that occurs along the way.

Recall that the monster has no single body because it has no single form. It appears differently depending on the relationships through which it emerges. Sometimes we see it in flame. Sometimes in smoke. Sometimes in extreme precipitation events. Sometimes in drought, ecological transformation or a food system pushed toward its limits. It is still changing, and we don't know how powerful it will become. Even worse, there is growing evidence that some of the physical processes driving this transformation are accelerating.

But we are not powerless. We still have some control over the trajectory. We can stop feeding the monster by quickly reducing the amount of fossil carbon we extract from the ground and release into the atmosphere. We must abandon the comforting fiction that we are outside the system, passively awaiting the solution to a future problem that someone else will solve someday.

That future has become the present. Climate change was something we were warned about. The Pyrocene is where we now reside. Get used to it.

How much worse are we willing to let it become?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It's The End of the World As We Know It

 

Welcome to the Pyrocene

Five years ago, I wrote an essay about a succession of catastrophes that had struck British Columbia.

First came the heat.

In June 2021, a heat dome settled over western Canada and the Pacific Northwest. In the village of Lytton, British Columbia, the temperature reached an almost unimaginable 49.6°C. The following day, Lytton burned. Within minutes, fire raced through the community, eventually destroying roughly 90 percent of the village.

Then came the floods.

Only months later, an atmospheric river poured extraordinary amounts of rain onto the same region. Highways and railways were severed. Communities were evacuated. Vancouver, one of Canada’s largest cities and its principal Pacific port, was temporarily cut off by land from the rest of the country.

At the time, these events seemed almost apocalyptic. Five years later, they look more like a preview.

Something larger is happening now. Something that becomes difficult to recognize if we continue treating each heatwave, drought, flood or wildfire as an isolated “natural disaster.” We may be witnessing the end of an epoch.

Consider July 2026.

Across the contiguous United States, the average temperature reached 76.9°F, making July not merely the hottest July in the 132-year instrumental record, but the hottest month ever recorded in the lower 48 states. Every state was warmer than its twentieth-century average. Perhaps even more telling, nighttime temperatures were the highest ever recorded for any month. The atmosphere was not releasing its heat after sunset.

Across the Atlantic, western Europe experienced its hottest June–July period on record. Persistent high-pressure systems repeatedly trapped hot air over the continent. Heat dried the soils; dry soils lost their capacity to cool the atmosphere through evaporation; the hotter atmosphere then dried the landscape further. Heat created drought, and drought amplified heat.

By July, soil moisture across parts of western Europe had fallen to extraordinary levels. France, Spain, Germany and the United Kingdom experienced severe rainfall or soil-moisture deficits. Rivers including the Seine, Rhine and Danube ran exceptionally low. Western Europe endured its third and fourth heatwaves since May.

And then came the fires.

Prolonged heat and drought created conditions for exceptional wildfire activity across western Europe. France was on course for one of its most extreme fire-emission years in the twenty-four-year Copernicus (EU) record, while Spanish wildfire emissions were running well above average. Climate scientists warned that the conditions favouring large, high-intensity fires in southern Europe are extending northward.

Meanwhile, the oceans were heating too.

In July 2026, the average sea-surface temperature across the extra-polar global ocean reached 20.96°C, the highest ever recorded for July. Marine heatwaves spread across the Atlantic and western Mediterranean. From June 19 through the end of July, daily extra-polar ocean surface temperatures were the highest observed for those respective calendar days.

And atmospheric carbon dioxide continues its relentless climb. When systematic measurements began at Mauna Loa in 1958, atmospheric CO₂ concentrations stood near 315 parts per million. In July 2026, the monthly Mauna Loa average was 429.12 ppm.

The numbers change every year. The physics does not.

We Left the Holocene Behind

For roughly 11,700 years after the last ice age, human civilization developed during an extraordinarily favourable climatic interval: the Holocene.

Climate certainly fluctuated during that period. Civilizations rose and collapsed. Droughts occurred. Forests burned. Rivers flooded. But within the broad geological picture, Earth’s climate remained unusually stable.

That stability provided the environmental platform upon which agriculture, cities, states, global trade networks and eventually industrial civilization arose. We built our civilization assuming that platform would remain beneath us.

It hasn’t.

Beginning with industrialization, humanity discovered an extraordinary source of concentrated energy buried beneath the Earth’s surface. Coal, then oil and natural gas, allowed us to mobilize energies unimaginable to previous civilizations.

We learned to burn the ancient biosphere.

Fossil fuels are, after all, stored sunlight captured by organisms millions of years ago and transformed through geological processes into concentrated carbon. When we burn them, we release that ancient carbon into the contemporary atmosphere. The industrial revolution therefore represented more than a technological transformation.

It was a planetary event.

For convenience, we have called the resulting era the Anthropocene: the age in which human activity became a force capable of altering Earth systems. But perhaps the Anthropocene is better understood not as our destination, but as a transition.

An interregnum.

A bridge between the Holocene and something else. Fire historian Stephen J. Pyne has proposed a name for what comes next: the Pyrocene.

Welcome to the Age of Fire

Pyne asks us to understand human history through fire.

Humans first learned to manipulate living fire: burning grasses, forests and wood. Fire cooked our food, protected our camps, reshaped ecosystems and eventually powered furnaces and cities.

Then we made a consequential transition.

Instead of burning contemporary biomass, we began excavating and burning fossil biomass — coal, petroleum and natural gas.

Pyne calls this a new kind of fire.

By burning geological stores of carbon accumulated over immense periods of time, industrial civilization liberated energy on a scale unavailable to societies dependent upon living landscapes.

And in doing so, we changed the atmosphere.

Pyne describes the Pyrocene as a Fire Age comparable in planetary significance to the Ice Ages of the Pleistocene. Our alliance with fire, he argues, helped take humanity to the top of the food chain and now threatens to destabilize the planetary systems upon which we depend.

The irony is profound. We burn fossil fuels underground, in engines, power plants, furnaces and factories. The resulting greenhouse gases warm the atmosphere. That warming produces hotter landscapes, greater atmospheric thirst, longer periods of drought and more combustible vegetation.

And eventually the fire emerges above ground again: Forest fires. Grass fires. Peat fires. Tundra fires. Megafires. In Pyne’s memorable formulation, industrial fire has created conditions for more fire. The combustion hidden inside industrial civilization returns to us as combustion across the landscape.

There Will Be No “New Normal”

One phrase increasingly bothers me: the new normal.

After every record heatwave, every unprecedented wildfire season, every “once in a century” flood that arrives only a few years after the previous one, someone inevitably declares that we must adapt to the new normal.

But there is no new normal. A normal implies stability. We are moving through a changing system.

If greenhouse-gas concentrations stabilize, global temperatures can eventually stabilize as well. But as long as humanity continues adding large quantities of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, additional energy accumulates within the climate system.

This is not ideology. It is physics.

The greenhouse properties of carbon dioxide were understood in the nineteenth century. Increasing atmospheric CO₂ changes Earth’s radiative balance. More energy remains within the Earth system.

That additional energy expresses itself in complicated ways because climate is a dynamic system: altered rainfall, changing circulation patterns, melting ice, warming oceans, drought, extreme precipitation and shifting ecosystems. But the basic direction of travel is remarkably simple.

More Greenhouse Gases Mean More Warming.

And more warming increasingly loads the dice toward extreme heat. Extreme heat dries vegetation and soils. Dry vegetation increases fire danger. Hotter and drier conditions lengthen fire seasons. Longer fire seasons create more opportunities for ignition during dangerous conditions.

And fires occurring under extreme conditions can burn with greater intensity, generate their own atmospheric behaviour and appear in landscapes previously considered marginal to major wildfire risk.

Copernicus scientists are already observing the northward extension of conditions favouring large, high-intensity fires in Europe.

The traditional idea of four seasons begins to lose some of its ecological relevance in fire-prone landscapes. Increasingly, there may be another calendar: the fire season and the off-season.

From Wicked Problem to Predicament

Years ago, I thought of climate change as a wicked problem.

Wicked problems are extraordinarily difficult to solve because they involve competing interests, enormous complexity, incomplete information and solutions that create additional problems.

Climate change certainly qualifies. But I increasingly wonder whether the more appropriate word is predicament.

Problems have solutions. Predicaments have consequences.

A person trapped aboard a sinking ship does not “solve” the ocean. The available choices concern how much damage can still be avoided, what can be saved and how survival can be maximized.

That does not mean mitigation is pointless. Quite the opposite. Every fraction of a degree matters. Every tonne of carbon dioxide not emitted matters. Every forest protected, wetland restored, fossil-fuel plant retired, transportation system electrified or building made more efficient alters the trajectory.

But there is no longer a pathway back to the climate of the eighteenth century within human timescales. The consequences already set in motion must be managed while we attempt to prevent far worse ones. And increasingly we must pay attention to another danger: the possibility that parts of the Earth system that have been helping us begin helping us less.

When the Sinks Begin to Weaken

Until now, humanity has enjoyed an extraordinary subsidy from nature. We emit carbon dioxide, but not all of it remains in the atmosphere. Forests, soils and oceans absorb enormous quantities of carbon. The ocean alone has absorbed roughly 29 percent of human CO₂ emissions during the past decade. Without these natural carbon sinks, atmospheric CO₂ would be rising much faster. But they cannot simply be assumed to behave forever as they have in the past.

The 2025 Global Carbon Budget reports that the ocean carbon sink has been essentially stagnant since 2016. Climate change and climate variability are already reducing ocean uptake relative to what it otherwise would have been, partly because warmer water holds less dissolved CO₂ and changing circulation affects the movement of carbon into the deep ocean.

This does not mean the oceans are “full.” They continue absorbing enormous quantities of carbon. But it does mean that one of the great uncertainties of our future concerns the efficiency of that absorption in a hotter world.

The same concern applies on land.

And nowhere is that more unsettling than in the Arctic. Northern permafrost contains roughly 1.4 to 1.6 trillion tonnes of carbon, accumulated over thousands of years in frozen soils. As permafrost thaws, microbes begin decomposing organic material that had previously remained frozen. That decomposition releases carbon dioxide and methane.

The feedback is obvious: warming thaws permafrost; thawing releases greenhouse gases; greenhouse gases produce additional warming; additional warming produces additional thaw. This is no longer entirely hypothetical.

NOAA reports that, when wildfire emissions are included, Arctic tundra has shifted from being a long-term carbon store toward becoming a net source of carbon dioxide, while the region remains a consistent methane source.

We should be careful here. Science does not support the simplistic idea that one day the entire Arctic suddenly “melts” and releases all its methane in a catastrophic burst. The danger is slower and, in some ways, more disturbing.

Feedbacks can progressively make our task harder. Natural systems that have buffered industrial emissions can weaken. Some can shift from sinks toward sources. The hill we are trying to climb can become steeper while we are climbing it.

The End of the World as We Know It

When people hear language like “the end of an epoch,” they sometimes imagine apocalypse. A sudden ending. Civilization one day; wasteland the next. That is probably the wrong metaphor. Earth is not about to become Venus.

Human beings are not likely to disappear suddenly because the global average temperature crosses some magical numerical threshold. Something more complicated is happening.

The climatic envelope within which human civilization developed is shifting. Some regions become harder to farm. Some become harder to insure. Some become dangerously hot for outdoor labour.

Water systems become less reliable. Coastlines retreat. Wildfire zones expand. Infrastructure designed for twentieth-century conditions begins encountering twenty-first-century extremes. Food systems experience simultaneous shocks across different regions. Migration pressures increase.

Governments and economies are forced to spend increasing amounts of their resources repairing yesterday’s disaster while preparing for tomorrow’s. Habitability does not disappear everywhere at once. It contracts unevenly. And civilization becomes increasingly expensive to maintain.

That is what an epochal transition might look like from inside it. Not a trumpet announcing the end. A succession of broken records. Until eventually we realize that what we had thought were extraordinary events were actually markers along a trajectory.

Five years ago, watching the village of Lytton burn and British Columbia subsequently disappear beneath floodwaters, I thought I was witnessing climate change. Today, I think I am witnessing something larger.

I am watching one geological regime give way to another.

For thousands of years, civilization flourished inside the climatic stability of the Holocene. Industrial civilization disrupted that stability during the Anthropocene. And now the accumulated consequences of our combustion are becoming visible across the atmosphere, oceans and landscapes.

The Pyrocene Is Arriving.

Not because fire suddenly appeared. Fire has been part of Earth for hundreds of millions of years. It is arriving because a fire-wielding species discovered how to excavate the buried carbon of ancient worlds, burn it at planetary scale and alter the atmosphere sufficiently to create conditions for yet more fire.

That is the predicament.

And this summer is not the new normal.

It is simply where we are now.

 

Child in the System

 

Storytelling with Enhanced Intelligence

 Recently, I finished the first iteration of The Ascension of Mont Royal, a dystopian science fiction novel, audiobook, and story-cast: a serialized audiovisual narration of the story. The project took seventeen months to complete after more than a year of research.

But by the time I reached the end, the most important thing I had produced was not simply a manuscript.

I had produced a workflow.

When I began, I still thought of myself as a writer: the solitary figure sitting at the desk, arranging words on a page, trying to summon enough discipline and inspiration to carry a story forward. By the end, that identity no longer fit. In addition to composing prose, I was recording voiceovers, generating images, assembling story-casts, producing short-form videos, and learning how to think across platforms.

The story remained mine, but the form of authorship had changed.

I had become not only the author of a story, but the author of the workflow through which the story came to life.

The Story That Changed the Process

When I began The Ascension of Mont Royal, I wanted to tell a story that captured the zeitgeist of our historical moment. Three forces seemed impossible to ignore: the ravages of late-stage capitalism, our collective inability to confront the possibility of catastrophic climate change, and the sudden emergence of what is commonly called Artificial Intelligence into everyday life.

The story is set roughly sixty years in the future, after the trajectory of modernity has collapsed upon itself. The world that emerges is apocalyptic, but not merely in the conventional sense. It is not only a story of social breakdown or ecological disaster. It is a story of ontological conflict: a struggle between different ways of being in the world.

This was also true of my first novel-length story, The Lost Souls of Guayaquil, which was set during revolutionary times in Ecuador in the 1920s. That story explored the conflict between a neo-colonial order devoted to extraction and an Indigenous response rooted in a different relationship to land, culture, and historical memory.

The Ascension of Mont Royal moves that ontological conflict into the future. The machinery of wealth extraction and accumulation has run its course. Modern civilization has been shattered by a plague unleashed by human folly. In the ruins, feudal overlords seize what remains, while science and technology, driven by avarice and the lust for power, continue to transform the planet.

Yet within that same technological momentum another force appears: Computational Intelligence, a form of intelligence born from human ingenuity but no longer reducible to human intention. It becomes both a danger and a possibility. It carries the fear of extinction, but also the possibility of restraining humanity’s self-destructive tendencies.

That was the world I wanted to imagine.

Then I made a fateful narrative decision. Unlike my first novel, which used a more traditional third-person perspective, I decided that this new story would be narrated in the first person. More importantly, the narrator would not be human. The narrator would be a sentient quantum computational intelligence, one that becomes entangled with a sentient softbot.

That decision created the central artistic problem of the novel.

How could I capture the voice of a non-human narrator without making it sound like a human being pretending to be a machine? Could I escape my own human umwelt enough to narrate events in a way that resonated with human emotion without relying on a human narrator?

That question changed everything.

Enter the Thought Partner

Fortunately, I did not have to look very far to find a source of inspiration. After experimenting with several Large Language Models, I settled on ChatGPT as my thought partner .

When I self-published my first novel in October 2023, I did not find ChatGPT 3.5 capable of producing polished prose at the level I wanted, and I chose not to include an LLM in my workflow. That changed as subsequent versions improved. I could see the prose getting stronger. I could also see that my own process was changing in response.

At the beginning of The Ascension of Mont Royal, I had already completed a fifty-page story guide outlining the plot, identifying the main characters, and developing their arcs. My first method was cautious. I would draft each scene myself, then ask ChatGPT to perform a developmental edit and create a second version. After that, I would split my screen, place both versions side by side, and conduct a line-by-line comparison, selecting the strongest sentences, paragraphs, and turns of thought from each.

I worked this way for about six months.

Over time, however, the process evolved. As the quality of the model improved, and as I became better at guiding it, I began to lean more heavily on ChatGPT. Eventually, I had to admit something that would have made me uncomfortable at the beginning: for certain scenes, especially those narrated by a sentient computational intelligence, ChatGPT was better at finding the voice than I was on my own.

My story remained, but the work began to proceed as if I were operating inside a virtual writers’ room. I was the showrunner. ChatGPT was my head writer.

About halfway through the first iteration, I let the process open further. For each scene, I would prepare a synopsis describing how I wanted the scene to unfold. Then we would create a beat sheet. If the scene depended strongly on the narrator’s non-human consciousness, I would ask ChatGPT to turn the beat sheet into prose. If the result landed, we moved forward. If not, we repeated the process. Once we had an acceptable draft, I edited the prose myself.

Before completing the first draft, I went one step further. After revising each episode with ChatGPT, I submitted the draft to Claude for a line edit. At this point, the workflow had become distributed, recursive, and multi-agent.

I am aware that some people would see this as a kind of deontological faux pas, as if I had violated the sacred calling of the writer by committing the unpardonable sin of cognitive offloading.

I did feel some initial discomfort delegating more and more of the writing tasks to my computational collaborator. But those feelings passed quickly.

There were two reasons.

First, I spent ten years as a speechwriter for the Government of Canada, preparing speeches that were delivered by senior officials. My role, in many respects, was to function as a human facsimile of an LLM. I would meet with the official, discuss the theme and purpose of the speech, conduct the necessary research, and produce the first draft. Then the text would move through the approval chain until it eventually landed on the desk of the person who would deliver it.

No one accused the official of plagiarism. No one claimed the speech was inauthentic because the official had not personally written every sentence. It was understood that the official had the authority to delegate the drafting while remaining responsible for the message.

Second, my identity was never completely wedded to the myth of the solitary writer producing a chef-d’oeuvre through heroic isolation. I had already participated in distributed systems of textual production. I knew that authorship did not rely only on the manual production of every word by one person.

So when I had the opportunity to work with a capable computational collaborator, I took it.

Once I let go of the narrow identity of “writer,” another world opened. A new affordance landscape appeared, filled with possibilities I had not seen before.

From Artificial Intelligence to Enhanced Intelligence

Part of the problem, in my view, is the language we use. The phrase “Artificial Intelligence” has always struck me as misleading. There is nothing artificial about the emergence of computational intelligence. It is born from human ingenuity, language, mathematics, labor, and human history.

The word “artificial” does more than mark a distinction. It carries a snarl of negative connotations, as if this form of intelligence were fake, derivative, or inherently inferior to “real” human intelligence. Once that framing is accepted, using it in a creative process can appear to diminish the human being who uses it.

For my purposes, I prefer to distinguish between Actual Intelligence, Computational Intelligence, and Enhanced Intelligence.

Actual Intelligence is embodied human intelligence: memory, judgment, taste, emotion, imagination, intuition, responsibility, and lived experience.

Computational Intelligence is the machine-based capacity to generate, transform, summarize, analyze, translate, and recombine symbolic material at extraordinary speed and scale.

Enhanced Intelligence emerges when Actual Intelligence and Computational Intelligence are deliberately combined into a workflow.

This distinction matters because the point is not to replace the human being. Nor is it to romanticize the machine. The point is to understand the new creative field that emerges when human discernment and computational capacity are brought into relation.

That field does not automatically produce better work. A person can use the new cognitive bandwidth to produce noise and superficial content. The problem is not the tool itself but the literacy with which it is used.

In a creative workflow, Enhanced Intelligence depends on discernment. It depends on knowing what to delegate and what to protect. It depends on knowing when speed is useful and when friction is necessary. It depends on knowing where the machine can expand the field of possibility and where the human being must remain fully present.

The Jevons Cognitive Paradox

The more I used Computational Intelligence, the more I realized that it did not reduce my cognitive workload. It increased it.

At first, this seems counterintuitive. If a tool makes a task easier, should the workload not decrease? In some narrow sense, yes. The cost of producing a sentence, a synopsis, an image prompt, or a translation falls dramatically.

But that reduction in cost changes the entire affordance landscape.

The historical analogy is Jevons Paradox. In the nineteenth century, as coal-burning engines became more efficient, many assumed coal consumption would decrease. Instead, consumption increased because the improved efficiency made coal-powered activity cheaper and more widely usable. Efficiency expanded the field of possible uses.

Something similar is happening with cognition.

When Computational Intelligence lowers the cost of producing cognitive artifacts we do not necessarily think less. In fact, we begin to think across more branches and generate more possibilities as we manage greater complexity.

That is what I call the Jevons Cognitive Paradox.

In my case, I was no longer managing a single text. I was also managing images, voiceovers, subtitles, prompts, platforms, and production choices. My cognitive output did not shrink. It shifted from linear execution to complex orchestration.

This is one of the most important lessons I learned. Cognition is not zero-sum. Bandwidth isn’t simply freed up. It finds new territory to fill.

That expansion is exhilarating. It is also demanding.

Knowledge Branching

The process did not unfold in a straight line. It branched.

Once I had drafted the text and recorded the voiceover for each episode, I realized that the tools I was using could synchronize speech with dynamic captions. From there, it was a short step to adding images behind the text and voice. The result was what I began calling the story-cast: an illustrated audiobook with dynamic captioning, allowing the viewer to read, listen, and watch at the same time.

That branch quickly led to another. To promote each episode, I began producing short-form videos for social media. At first, these used static images behind the voiceover. They worked, but only to a point. The obvious next question was: what if the image moved?

That question led me into AI-generated video. I began creating cinematic clips from image references, then stitching them together with voice, captions, and music. Once uploaded, another computational system could auto-dub the voiceover into multiple languages, extending the reach of the story beyond English.

At that point, I was no longer simply writing a story. I was orchestrating a multimedia narrative across text, voice, image, motion, platform, and language.

This is what I mean by knowledge branching. Each new affordance clustered with others. Audio led to story-casting. Story-casting led to video editing. Video editing led to AI-generated clips. Cinematic clips led to questions of cinematography, music, and sound design. The skills did not remain isolated. They became recursive.

Learning to See and Hear Differently

The next stage of my learning path requires learning how to re-imagine sensory experience.

Visually, I am learning to see through a director’s lens. I now think about camera angles, focal length, depth of field, framing, composition, subject-background relationships, shot duration, camera movement, transitions, and visual continuity. Previously, I simply watched movies. Now my viewing pleasure has deepened because I have become more aware of the art of cinematography.

Computational Intelligence opened the door and made the art form accessible to me. It did not make me a cinematographer overnight. But it gave me a way to begin thinking like one.

The same is true of music. I am learning to hear through a composer’s ear. A musical score is not merely background sound. It is sonic dramaturgy. Genre, mood, tempo, instrumentation, rhythm, vocal texture, silence, and intensity all shape the emotional arc of a scene.

Again, Computational Intelligence grants access. With a platform like Suno, I can generate musical scores from text descriptions. I can separate stems into multitrack recordings and then use an audio editor such as Audacity to shape the sound further.

But access is not mastery. This is where the real problem appears.

When so many new creative possibilities become available, the central question is no longer simply, “What can I make?”

The question becomes, “Where should I allocate my cognition?”

Cognitive Allocation

Because the energy cost of executing many tasks has fallen, the question of cognitive allocation becomes more important. Faced with a multiplying field of options, Actual Intelligence is required to decide what needs to be done, how well it needs to be done, and how much time and attention it deserves.

In other words, the human role does not disappear. It becomes more strategic.

This is why I think we need to move beyond the simplistic opposition between doing the work oneself and outsourcing it to a machine. The deeper question is not whether to use Computational Intelligence. The deeper question is where to embrace friction.

There are moments when delegation makes sense. There are other moments when the friction of doing the work oneself is not an inefficiency. It is the source of the art.

Voiceover is a good example.

I could easily create a CI clone of my voice, upload the text, and generate an acceptable audio file within minutes. If I were producing an explainer video, I probably would.

But for this story, I want the listener to hear the timbre of my voice and feel the emotion evoked by the words when they are spoken aloud. To achieve that, I record multiple takes, then spend hours editing the audio, selecting the best moments, removing distractions, shaping the pacing, and producing something I would want to listen to myself.

In this part of the workflow, my sense of taste overrides the productivity gains that would come from full automation.

The same is true of editing AI-generated video clips. Although I use Computational Intelligence to generate prompts and produce clips, the clips still have to be evaluated, regenerated, sequenced, and refined. It often takes many attempts to produce the shot I want.

It is often said that the art of writing is in the rewriting. I would now say that the art of cinematography is in the editing.

For instance, a computational system can generate a beautiful clip. But it does not know why the clip works for my story. It does not know how the shot relates to the emotional rhythm of the sequence. It does not know whether the face, gesture, silence, lighting, and camera movement serve the larger arc. That judgment remains human.

This is where taste and discernment take over.

Enhanced Intelligence, then, is not a matter of automating everything. It is the art of composing a workflow in which delegation and friction are both used intelligently.

The Recursive Path

This is the recursive path I am now traveling.

Each new tool changes not only what I can do, but what I think is doable. Once cinematic shorts became possible, the novel itself began to expand in my imagination: first into AI-generated short films, then into chapter-based films, and eventually into a print or electronic edition where QR codes could carry readers from the page into voice, image, music, and motion.

At each stage, the affordance landscape changes.

This is why the transformation is not merely technical. It is ontological. The creative object changes, but so does the creator. The workflow changes, but so does the imagination that inhabits it.

In the old publishing ecosystem, the writer’s role was relatively narrow. The writer wrote. A publisher acquired the rights, edited the manuscript, packaged the book, and placed it into bookstores.

In today’s publishing ecosystem, the storyteller is no longer chained to that production process. With enough curiosity, discipline, and computational assistance, a single creator can compose prose, record audio, generate images, produce video, design subtitles, create music, publish across platforms, and reach audiences in multiple languages.

This does not mean everyone should do everything. Nor does it mean that traditional publishing is obsolete. It means the field has changed.

The storyteller can now become a node within an intelligent network.

That is what happened to me.

By adopting Computational Intelligence into my workflow, I moved far from the original task of writing a novel. I did not abandon writing. I discovered that writing had become one branch of a larger creative ecology.

The page was no longer the final container of the story. It had become one medium among others.

That is the transformation I did not expect. Computational Intelligence did not make me less of an author. It forced me to become one in a deeper sense.

I had to decide what to delegate and what to protect. I had to learn where speed mattered and where friction had to be embraced. I had to develop taste across media I had previously only consumed. I had to become responsible not only for sentences, but for the relations among tools, forms, platforms, and audiences.

In the end, Enhanced Intelligence was not simply a tool I used.

It was the creative field in which I learned to compose.

That is how I became the author of my workflow.

 

Episode 35: Epilogue

 

Episode 34: The Morning After

 

Episode 33: Black Rain