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The geopolitical - or more specifically pyropolitical - crisis triggered by combusting fossilized hydrocarbons can be viewed in the context of a much longer human history of utilising fire as a means of traversing and utilizing the Earth's subsurface. The paper develops a conceptual framework to show how the developing fire-subsurface nexus advances through a succession of different human enfoldings or 'involutions' of fire that serve to intensify its force. This is explored at three critical junctures: the earliest hominin uses of fire in the geologically active landscape of the Great Rift Valley, the chambering of fire by ancient artisans and the material and political significance of its products in emergent city-states, and the role of explosive weapons in gunpowder empires. Finally, the paper circles back on the question of how revisiting the longue durée of human fire-subsurface entanglements might help us conceive of alternative pyropolitical realities.

In its explicit engagement with the possibility of human extinction, the Anthropocene thesis might be seen as signalling a 'crisis of natality'. Engaging with two works of fiction – Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces – the article explores the embodied, affective and intimate dimensions of the struggle to sustain life under catastrophic conditions. Though centred on male protagonists, both novels offer insights into a 'stratigraphic time' associated primarily with maternal responsibility – involving a temporal give-and-take that passes between generations and across thresholds in the Earth itself. If this is a construction of inter-corporeality in which each life and every breath has utmost value, it is also a vision that exceeds the biopolitical prioritization of the organismic body – as evidenced in both McCarthy's and Michaels' gesturing beyond the bounds of the living to a forceful, sensate and enigmatic cosmos.

A review essay on books by Graham Harman, 'Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics' (Melbourne: Re.press, 2009); Bruno Latour, Graham Harman and Peter Erdelyi, 'The Prince and the Wolf' (Winchester: Zero Books, 2011).

Early engagement with geoengineering by social scientists indicates a certain suspicion over the motives and modes of operation of scientific research in the field. In part, this reflects the prominence of the critique of the politics of emergency in recent social and political thought: a thematisation that links securitisation measures with foreclosures of the political. This paper turns the attention back on the social sciences, arguing that recent styles of ontological and political thought do not prepare us well for engaging with geologic issues in general, and geoengineering in particular. It is suggested that, rather than viewing geoengineering discourses and imaginaries as a retreat from politics, we might view them as playing an important role in opening up new kinds of politics oriented towards earth systems and their dynamics. This new 'geologic politics' involves a turn from issues hinging on territorial divisions of the earth's surface toward the strata that compose the deep temporal earth. As a political challenge, the question of how to live with dynamic and stratified earth systems not only promises to extend the scope of politics, but also points to the 'inhuman' limits of the political per se.

If origins are as complex and perturbing as Derrida suggests, then we might ask of the current anthropic environmental predicament: what kind of planet is it that gives birth to a creature capable of doing such things? Biological life may be at its liveliest along the earth's sutures and fault-lines. But so too is fire. If humans are a fire species, then this is a fire planet. From the point of view of a 'speculative geophysics', our combustive habits may say at least as much about the deep-seated role of fire in welding together a fractious and differentiated planet as they do about any aberration on our own part.

AbstractThe current drought in Australia raises questions about the extent to which urban life depends on physical forces that come with their own dynamics and eccentric rhythms. I suggest that currently deepening understandings of the inherent volatility of earth processes might help us appreciate the accomplishments of those who have stayed in place for hundreds or thousands of years: peoples whose 'nomadic' journeys through deep time have taken them through major bio‐ or geo‐physical transformations in their environments. In this way, we might learn to recognize how most urban or settled life inherits terrains whose irregularities and extremes have been softened by the efforts of these prior inhabitants. In a world where we can expect major environmental changes to induce new waves of estrangement and displacement, I ask whether a sense of the immeasurable debt which we owe to those people who came before us might help inspire the kind of cosmopolitan sensibilities we would hope for.RésuméLa sécheresse que connaît actuellement l'Australie pousse à se demander dans quelle mesure la vie urbaine dépend de forces physiques qui obéissent à leur rythme excentrique et à leur dynamique propre. En approfondissant notre compréhension de la nature éphémère de la Terre, nous pourrions mieux apprécier les réalisations de ceux qui se sont implantés pendant des centaines ou des milliers d'années : des peuples que leur "nomadisme" par des temps reculés a fait traverser les grandes mutations biophysiques et géophysiques de leur environnement. Ainsi, nous pourrions apprendre à reconnaître comment la vie urbaine ou sédentaire hérite en grande partie de terrains dont les irrégularités et les excès ont été atténués par les efforts de ces habitants antérieurs. Dans un monde où nous pouvons nous attendre à ce que des changements environnementaux considérables provoquent de nouvelles vagues d'éloignement et de déplacement, la perception de l'incommensurable dette redevable à ces peuples arrivés avant nous pourrait peut‐être inspirer le genre de sensibilités cosmopolites que nous pourrions espérer.

Steering away from the more obvious concern with the breakdown of social order following Hurricane Katrina, this article draws on weblogs and bulletin boards to highlight acts of generosity and hospitality provoked by the disaster and poses some questions about what disasters might tell us about the emergence of the "social."