A local author is finding international success with his book about climate change. Ian Angus published “Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and a Crisis of the Earth System” back in 2016. It took him about two years to write and it focuses on the earth’s transition from the Holocene era to the Anthropocene era, where human activities are changing the world more than natural processes. “We are actually not just causing local pollution but actually changing the climate, the way the rivers run, changing the chemical composition of the oceans, and so on,” he says.
Ian states that this transition began sometime around the end of World War II, and has now reached the point where human activity is affecting all of earth’s systems. “We have now, through our activities, shifted the condition of the earth out of its natural course,” he says.
Ian was inspired to write the book because of all the misinformation he was seeing in the media about the Anthropocene and how this new era was affecting the planet. “It’s not a simple topic, but what I was trying to do, was take the science and make it accessible to lay readers,” he says.
The book was published by Monthly Review Press in New York and garnered a great response with English speaking readers across the globe. It has been adopted as reading material in many universities and colleges, and Ian even travelled all the way to Australia to promote the book in 2016.
Over the past few years, Ian has been approached by many people wanting to translate the book into different languages. It began with a publisher in Quebec who wanted to translate it into French, and it has now also been published in German, Italian and Turkish. Ian says there is a professor in China who is working on a translation, as well as a publishing house in Korea who wants to translate it into Korean.
The English version has now gone through five printings, which Ian says is unheard of for this kind of science-based book. His goal was always to reach the masses, and he even took a cut in royalties to keep it at an accessible price. “It’s really gratifying when your work is accepted by the people you wanted to read it,” he says. “I wanted this book to reach the people who were environmentalists, people who were concerned about the state of the world and wanted to understand why it was like this.”
Ian never imagined the book to reach as far as it has, and he is thrilled with the idea that more people will be able to read it through translation. Over the past year, he has been invited to speak through Zoom in Turkey and Ireland, and has another virtual talk coming up in Switzerland next month. “It’s a terrific feeling to have your work appreciated,” he says.
He is currently working on another book focusing on the underlying drivers that cause human society to conflict with nature and create rifts in the metabolic cycles of the planet.
For more from Ian, visit his website at www.climateandcapitalism.com. You can also purchase “Facing the Anthropocene” online through Indigo or Amazon.
