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Mason Kirkpatrick & Rose Mayer Background (See Capitalocene Lab #1capitalocene-lab-1-10-22-18.html) The two new capitalocene indicators that I chose were percent urban population and percent forest cover. I chose these indicators specifically because the percent of a countries urban population goes hand in hand with the migration of people moving to urban centers for industrial jobs. I also chose percent forest cover because it directly ties into my concentration because when related to urban growth it demonstrates the relationship between change of habitat and need for more infrastructure. Procedure. First we cleaned our spreadsheets to make sure the data was clear and ordered properly and so that uploading our spreadsheet as a csv to Gis would work. Then we downloaded our new capitalocene indicators from the world bank database. From there we uploaded them as new sheets and merged them with our main sheet so our new data was included in the csv file. We merged another sheet with the two digit ISO codes to our main sheet as well. Additionally, I found the percent change for both of my new indicators over the past decade by subtracting the old value from the current value so I could view the trend. From there we downloaded our sheet as a csv then uploaded it to a map on ArcGis. On ArcGis we were able to display the data comparatively by country on one map. Results When viewing these maps you can see that the global trends for these new indicators. For urban population you can see that on a global area most countries are becoming more urban than before. For forest cover you can see that there is a global decrease in forest cover. View my ArcGis map here (https://arcg.is/1WvO8e) Discussion On very obvious level you can see that countries that experienced a decrease of the past ten years had a worse environmental performance because of the way that deforestation is calculated into ecosystem vitality.. The relationship between urban population growth and ecosystem vitality is rather ambiguous in the sense that there is no direct correlation between the two. On one hand, if more people are moving to urban centers than their impact on the ecosystem vitality could be decreased but they are adding to the whole impact on the city. On the other, urban population growth symbolized an increased industrial demand for labor which in unregulated areas can pollute local ecosystems. The larger implications of the existence of these relationships, or lack thereof, support the idea that the capitalocene is the dictating force and has taken over from the anthropocene. While the argument could be made that these factors support the capitalocene because they are driven by anthropocentric action and thus support the anthropocene. The same argument could be made in favor of the capitalocene by arguing that these human actions are driven by the desire for capital. In conclusion these factors represent and support the capitalocene because they are symbolic of the desire for capital.
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AuthorMason Kirkpatrick. Class of 2021 Archives
November 2018
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