This note from the editors appears in print in our latest issue—alongside essays by Emily Raboteau, Marcus J. Moore, Dr. Sylvester James Gates, and Catherine Lacey; poems by Eileen Myles and Ariana Reines; and drawings by Daniel Johnston.

We humans get much less sleep than other primates, typically not succumbing to drowsiness until well past nightfall. We’re also inclined to socialize after dusk; some celebratory behaviors are only abided after sundown. These nocturnal habits are more than cultural norms. They reflect evolutionary consequences that can be attributed to our domestication of fire. The rise in evening hours spent around burning cinders may have shaped our ancestors’ circadian rhythms in ways that are now biologically embedded.

It was around a million years ago, give or take a few hundred thousand, that the first hominids controlled fire. Our evolutionary predecessors would have known fire’s heat and light, engulfing trees or torching plains, shaping their landscapes. Naturally occurring fires were first captured and maintained to warm hands and roast game, to protect caves and kin from predators at night. But then our forebears struck flint to dry grass to make fire themselves, a discovery that still eludes our chimpanzee cousins. This advance has been credited by scientists with much of what makes us human. Fire allowed us to migrate from tropical to temperate zones; to cook and consume vastly increased sums of protein and calories; to take in the fatty acids that our brains needed to grow. We controlled fire. But then fire controlled us––not just our daily cycles but our mandibles, our metabolisms, our minds.

With fire we developed a compulsive need to transform our circumstances by controlling Earth’s resources. We forged ever-more potent tools for doing so. Since the Neolithic Revolution 12,000 years ago, this impulse has defined our accelerating dash toward what once may have looked like techno-salvation but which looks increasingly like our own extinction. Our will to turn Earth’s combustibles into energy has been the essential story of the anthropocene ever since James Watt got his steam engine whirring in 1769. Ambition cooking the biosphere into oblivion.

We contemplate these aspects of our species’ story at Pioneer Works, sometimes with bemusement. After dark, our audience collects around the fire pit in our garden for conversations and music that have inspired pages in this print issue, Broadcast’s third. Robert Macfarlane reminded us, as we recount in an assemblage of quotes from animals who’ve graced our stage, that “when we recognize what is human in the creaturely, we also recognize what is creaturely in the human.”

It’s perhaps inevitable, as our own oblivion feels proximate, that we’ve turned our technology toward a signal fantasy of our age: the aim of leaving our damaged earth altogether to colonize space—never mind that our mandibles, metabolisms, and minds have been forged by forces here on Earth. That’s the subject of one piece here. Others skirt our self-proclaimed importance and our technological compulsions. Biologists remind us that whales have been breaching and thriving in our oceans for 50 million years with no technological ambition, while we’re on the brink of self-inflicted extinction after tens of thousands.

We sapiens are a technological species. We’re also an artistic one, and have been since our forebears threw up drawings by firelight on the walls of caves. We examine our lot, and produce wonders. This issue charts some of those, in the prose of writers we cherish and drawings by a musician we love; in geometric diagrams of reality’s matrix and maps of ocean floors; in tributes to cosmic jazz and efforts to daylight a brook in the Bronx; in an excavation of the history, and ghosts, of the brick-walled former iron works we call home.

Our fundamental nature as pyrotechnic primates may well be incompatible with our longevity as a species. This we know. What will we do while we’re here? Are we apes? Are we geniuses? Are we poets? Will we burn Earth to the ground? Can we save it? Will we go to Mars? Should we? Are we the apex in life’s experiment or villains in the evolutionary story?

As Cornel West said from our stage, “We are a wretched species…yet we are also wonderful.” ♦