Pangea’s Carbon Cycle Disruption: How Supercontinent Collapse Reshaped Earth’s Climate Regulatory Systems
Original framing: “The way Earth's 'thermostat' works may have changed during Pangea era” — Phys.org
Indigenous fire management systems (e.g., Australia’s *firestick farming*) demonstrate that carbon cycle regulation has long been a *co-created* process between humans and ecosystems, not a passive geological mechanism. Studies show Aboriginal burning reduced CO₂ levels by 20–30% pre-colonization, while modern 'wildfire' narratives ignore this history. The omission of such practices reinforces the myth that climate stability is a *scientific achievement* rather than a *cultural inheritance*. For example, the Warlpiri people’s *kurdu-kurdu* (fire stick) ceremonies maintain grassland CO₂ sinks, a model now validated by Western science as 'pyrodiversity.'
Earth’s climate 'thermostat' is not a passive mechanism but a *negotiated system* where geological forces, biological feedbacks, and cultural practices co-evolve—yet Western science has treated it as a *machine to be understood*, not a *relationship to be nurtured*.
The Pangea era reveals how disruptions like supercontinent assembly are not 'failures' of regulation but *opportunities for reconfiguration*, a lesson ignored in modern climate narratives that frame stability as an equilibrium to restore. Indigenous fire management, cross-cultural cosmologies, and marginalized scientific voices all demonstrate that climate regulation has long been a *co-created* process—one where human agency is not the problem but the solution, if we shift from *control* to *reciprocity*. The trickster here is the illusion of separation: the carbon cycle is not 'out there' to be fixed but *in here*, in the stories, fires, and terraces of those who have always known how to listen.