Week 7 Lab Report

Lab Group: Steffen Seamon, Simon Cohen

Date of Inquiry: 10-18-18

Capitalocene Lab Week 7

Background

This lab marked our shift into research about the capitalocene. The capitalocene is a definition of our modern era that was created to further define the relationships in the anthropocene. As we saw in readings by Ellis et al. the anthropocene is defined by the changes to climate caused by unchecked human interference with environmental processes. The people who defined the capitalocene argue that the way humans have terraformed the earth is due to the capitalistic nature with which shapes our relationships with the natural world. In this lab we investigated how the wealth different nations interacted with their relationship to the environment. We investigated this to understand how capitalism and the aspiration of wealth has shaped environmental health. To measure this, we looked at data from the Yale Environmental Performance Index (EPI) and the World Bank. The EPI investigates 180 countries and then provides them an EPI score that combines each countries performance across 24 indicators. The World Bank gathers a number of different data relating the wealth of nations. We created an index of most of the worlds countries and cross referenced their EPI score with their wealth and region to begin to understand how all these factors relate to each other.

Procedure

First, we created an index of all the data we had from the EPI and the World Bank. To do this, we merged two spreadsheets into one combining data about common subjects between the two, which in this case were countries. Then, using formula within our spreadsheet software, we calculated the mean and standard deviation of the EPI score, ecosystem health score, and ecosystem vitality score for countries of four different income groups and seven different regions. Then, we graphed this data using a bar and line graph, where the bars displayed the mean scores and the line displayed the standard deviations.

Results

This chart shows the count, mean, and standard deviation for all the variables that we investigated in this lab. A higher score for the means generally means that the countries performed better in the assessments of the environmental performance.

This graph displays the mean and standard deviation of the EPI score of the countries we investigated in four income groups that were determined by the World Bank. Their environmental performance decreased directly with their wealth.

This graph displays the mean and standard deviation of the EPI score of the countries we investigated in the regions that were determined by the World Bank. North America has the highest mean EPI.

This graph displays the mean and standard deviation of the ecosystem vitality score of the seven regions we investigated. In this, we can see that Europe and Central Asia performed the best, despite not having the highest mean EPI.

Discussion

The idea of the capitalocene is not fully supported by the results we found. Overall EPI, ecosystem health, and ecosystem vitality increased directly with increases in income across the countries we studied. The standard deviations of the means we found were relatively low meaning this data is pretty reliable. This would mean that countries who have the most wealth are able to better take care of their ecosystems. While this does not disprove the existence of a capitalocene, these results do not do much to further that theory. In a true capitalocene we would expect that almost anything would be done to the environment in the pursuit of immediate wealth. This would mean exploitation of natural resources for purposes like production. In our lab, we found that wealth did not correlate with environmental degradation. To do a more robust exploration of this topic, we could look at the individual 24 EPI indicators across the globe and also look at how countries have developed over time as they have accumulated wealth.