My Learning and Identity Formation Through Social Groups

When I started studying Bracher’s Radical Pedagogy: Identity, Generativity, and Social Transformation (as listed on Chapters.ca), I was drawn to the ideas that he proposes related to self identity, how the need to be recognized motivates people, and how this allows people to learn in both positive and negative ways. As Bracher explains in great deal in chapter two (pg, 17-30), individuals’ actions are primarily motivated by the recognition and value others in their peer group and society place on those actions, which forms the individuals’ identity within those groups. This especially hit home for me, as I am lucky enough to have a group of friends that I have been close with since I was 11 years old. Although I knew that they played a very important role in my life, I never thought about them impacting my personal identity and how much their recognition has meant to my decisions over the years.

When I think back to when my friends and I were teenagers, we were always seeking validation from each other by  dressing a certain way that the others approved of, taking part in different activities or groups at school that were accepted as being “cool”, and so on. In terms of our scholarly learning, we all did very well in high school and, although I never thought of it this way before, the need to be recognized and accepted by our peers motivated us to keep up our grades so we’d continue to “fit in” with our peer group since that group formed so much of our identity. Huh.

Everyone wants to know, "Where do I fit in?"



Following high school, “the thing to do” was to go on to university and obtain a bachelor’s degree in something we were interested in. For one friend and I, that was a Bachelor of Commerce degree at Saint Mary’s University (SMU). Although I had considered going to Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN), my friend convinced me that Halifax was the place for us and a four-year program (as opposed to the five-year program at MUN) would be a better option. So we lived together during our Undergraduate years and she molded many of my experiences at SMU, including working for the Students’ Association for three years (she prompted me to apply for a job with her when I just didn’t feel like it), and what my course schedule looked like for my first two years (we planned our schedules so we could be in classes together). Although I was a young adult learner at the time, it was much easier to decide to skip a class here and there if I had a friend who wanted to skip it with me. But this dynamic also benefitted my learning, since she helped me study for exams in the courses I lacked skills in and I helped her through the assignments and material in the classes she wasn’t as proficient in. As we learned through reading Wenger’s Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (as listed on Chapters.ca), we are all part of numerous communities of practice in our lives in which we learn from, add value to, and contribute to. This friend was a big part of my identity as a member of the Saint Mary’s University community of practice since we had many mutual friends, classmates, and co-workers. Without a doubt, my identity formation and learning during my Undergraduate degree would have been different if we hadn’t gone to university together.

Jump ahead to current day and I’m still very close with the group of friends I mentioned above, along with some great friends I’ve made along the way in Halifax. However, life continues to change for everyone and the majority of my girlfriends are now married, some with children. Talk about a shift in identity and being able to relate to each other!  As soon as my friends became engaged or pregnant, they started to become involved in new communities of practice and social groups based on their new life events. They learned many new things about the exciting life events they were experiencing, none of which I could relate to. Initially, when the wedding and baby boom started I felt somewhat overwhelmed just being on the outskirts, taking it all in. In hindsight, I can see how I was likely feeling beset, since the dynamics of the group were changing and I wasn’t sure where my place was anymore – My identity in a group I had been a part of for so long was threatened.  Now, however, I’ve become proficient in all-things weddings and babies, not because I have experienced those things myself, but because I have learned so much from being with my friends as they go through them. Much of the group conversation now trends towards house purchasing, wedding planning, pregnancy, and babies. So, as a learner in my major social groups, I’m becoming well informed (and prepared?) by my friends passing along what they consider culturally important information on how to improve these processes or tasks in the future. As we know from Tomasello (as listed on Chapters.ca), this is an important part of human cultural transmission. 

Here I am with the girls I grew up with on Canada Day in 2006. Since then, we've added four (soon-to-be five) husbands and two (soon-to-be six) children to our community of practice.

By reading about the impact social groups have on identity formation and internalizing it from my own life’s perspective, I have a much greater appreciation of where others may be coming from in a scholarly, social, or workplace setting. It’s helpful to know that everyone we encounter has many different factors that impact their identity and in turn influences their behavior, a very important factor being the social groups they are a part of.      

They Like Me, They Really Like Me... Because I Buy Local

We’ve all heard the reports about the difficult, deplorable working conditions that workers suffer through in low-paying jobs in China’s manufacturing plants. Yet we continue to buy goods that we know were manufactured in those plants and most of us turn a blind eye to the poor circumstances that workers in foreign countries endure so we can have the latest gadgets, clothing, or footwear at a low price. Then we’ll turn around and pay a premium for fresh produce or crafts from a local vendor at a market. Other than the health benefits of eating fresh produce, what causes us to want to support people in our local area as opposed those in other countries?

When discussing communities of practice in the last couple of classes, Dr. Plumb explained that boundary objects transmitted from one community of practice to another don’t hold any negotiated value for those on the receiving end. Although the object may hold much value for those who created or produced it initially, that meaning is lost once the object is transmitted to an outside community of practice. To further illustrate this notion, Dr. Plumb used the example of large Apple Inc manufacturing plants in China which produce iPhones and iPads. Although we understand that working conditions in manufacturing plants in China are sub-standard and dangerous, many of us wouldn’t think to research where our electronic gadgets are coming from. We’d go to a retailer here in Canada to buy, for example, an iPad not thinking of the value and meaning it holds for the people who manufactured it. We don’t share any meaning with those people in the object since it takes on a completely different meaning in our own life. Here’s an interesting video from ABC News Nightline that takes a look inside one of the manufacturing plants:

Interestingly enough, those Apple plants in China “are far better than those at garment factories or other facilities elsewhere in the country” despite “reports of worker suicides, a plant explosion and slave-like conditions” (read the article from reuters.com). However, since we are so far removed from the workers who build the products, they don’t hold much value for us. We don’t interact with the workers who produce our goods so we don’t have any associated meaning with the products they provide to companies that sell them to us. These boundary objects don’t hold any negotiated meaning and they come from people who belong to what we’d consider an out group so we tend to not place as much human value on workers we don’t know.

I thought this was interesting because, alternatively, when it comes to purchasing goods that we know are produced locally, there is a social movement underway where more and more people are buying local goods and produce whenever they can. In Halifax, there are different forms of “Buy Local” campaigns and markets that feature local producers. Wenger would explain that we want to support our local merchants because these people are more familiar to us and they are in our immediate community of practice due to living in the same region. We can relate to them and would consider them to be more of a member of our in group than those in other parts of the world.

The I Love Local Halifax group encourages Haligonians to shop and dine at local, independant businesses.

As Tomasello tells us in The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (as listed on Chapters.ca), as humans we transmit meaning and cultural information with each other through shared meaning and goals. By reading Wenger’s in Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (as listed on Chapters.ca), we learned that communities of practice provide people with a sense of belonging and acceptance by adding value to shared information together. In current Canadian society, it is accepted that making socially conscious buying choices by buying local goods and produce whenever possible is the best choice. Although there are groups and organizations that spread awareness on the working conditions in the countries that produce the majority of the textiles and electronics we use in North America, it is still socially acceptable for us to purchase these goods at the retailers that sell them. These purchasing habits are so normal in many communities of practice that they are reifications most people don’t think twice about.

However, if we take this a step further with Bracher’s Radical Pedagogy: Identity, Generativity, and Social Transformation (as listed on Chapters.ca) we could argue that people support sustainable and local buying habits not only for the health benefits and to support people they feel closer to in their communities of practice but also because “our identity requires recognition by others” (p. 7). Since buying local is the “in” thing to do, we can assume that individuals will be appreciated by their peers by following the trend and will gain greater acceptance and recognition from others in their immediate community of practice.

We all desire recognition from others.

I had never reflected on my buying habits in this way. I realize that the above points I made are all about being human and how we instinctually live our lives in today’s society within our communities of practice. And, unfortunately, I do believe that changing the working conditions in manufacturing plants other countries is beyond our control. Now more than ever, North America is relying more and more on consuming goods that were manufactured in China (for more on the topic, read “China Makes, The World Takes”).  However, I think it is important for us to be aware of the world around us outside of our immediate “city” of communities of practice so we can make informed choices and to help share the meaning and value of our buying power with those we interact with.  

The Golden Flow of Boundary Objects

After watching the movie Crash (Lions Gate Films, 2004) in class this past week, I started thinking about how people affect one another and how we’re all linked through our various interactions and communities of practice. We affect other people every day. Individuals flow in and out of our lives, some having more of an impact than others. Our choices and actions affect others and sometimes we impact them by imparting part of our community of practice into theirs with a boundary object. These boundary objects will often cause a ripple effect, with boundary object after boundary object being shared with different community of practices.

How many ripple effects in transmitting boundary objects have you caused?

As Etienne Wenger explains in Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (as listed on Chapters.ca), boundary objects can be described as “objects that serve to coordinate the perspectives of various constituencies for some purpose” (p. 106). He further explains that these items are developed through the reification process in communities of practice so they provide a shared meaning, understanding, and use for those members. As you recall from Michael Tomasello’s The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (as listed on Chapters.ca) being human allows us to share meaning of items (like boundary objects) with others in our community of practice or to act as brokers to those in other communities of practice in order to pass along the meaning of that object.

How then, do we impact other humans in communities of practice outside of our own through the transmission of boundary objects? As members of certain communities of practice, we often relate to those in our immediate community more than those who belong to a different community. As Tomasello would tell us, this is primarily related to the fact that as primates we relate to and look out for those in our in group and opposed to those in out groups. As such, we tend to think of individuals who are different from us and in different communities of practice as objects as opposed to people. We don’t relate to them as one of our own since we haven’t established a sense of belonging or any negotiated meaning with them so we place less value on their contributions to our lives. Since we don’t value them as much, we don’t tend to dwell on the impact our mundane day-to-day interactions with those people may have on their lives.


To further illustrate the notion of how our actions affect others, remember the movie that Gwyneth Paltrow starred in called Sliding Doors (Paramount Pictures, 1998)? At the beginning of the movie, we see Paltrow’s character Helen rushing to catch a subway train. She’s rushing down the stairs into the station and has to momentarily pause to dodge a child walking up the stairs who tries to show Helen a doll she is holding in her hand. As a result Helen misses the train. The film then rewinds and we see Helen rushing down the steps again. This time, however, an adult (presumably the child’s parent) pulls the child out of Helen’s way before she can block her with the doll and Helen is able to just catch the train.  From there on, we see the two divergent paths that Helen’s life would take if she caught the train versus if she missed the train. Here’s the opening scene of the movie:

As you then witness in the movie, the little girl’s actions could have started a ripple effect of boundary objects being transmitted which would have had a huge impact on Helen’s life. When you start to think about life in terms of how your actions and transmission of boundary objects affect others, you can see just how much impact we all have on each other’s lives, in both a negative and positive ways. I realize that this is all part of “real life” and is “how the world works” but it is interesting to examine nonetheless.

On a larger scale, we briefly discussed how the ripple effect or “golden flow of boundary objects” is present in government and with those in positions of power in this past week’s class. To illustrate this idea, Dr. Plumb explained how the leader of a country’s order to go to war acts as a boundary object that is handed down through the various levels of government and military (ie. communities of practice within the overall city of practices in a government), which acts as a catalyst for other boundary objects to be transmitted to other communities of practice with that “city” and beyond. As a result, soldiers at the bottom of the pyramid of command go to war carrying out orders of the person at the top of the pyramid. This not only affects the people in their close communities of practice like their family and friends, but will also affect those they may injure in war and those people’s family and friends, their family and friends, and so on.

In many government structures, the golden flow of boundary objects starts with one person at the top of the pyramid of power. 

Although we easily get swept up in our own lives and within our own city of communities of practice, it’s also important for us to understand how our interactions through transmitting boundary objects to others affect them and those beyond them. When you realize you have power to influence others’ lives, perhaps you’ll think twice before jumping in front of someone when you’re in a rush or beeping at someone in traffic for example, and think about ways you can use that power to positively influence those within your city and beyond instead.

Are Communities of Practice Stressing Us Out?

Walking to work Thursday morning, my mind was filled with numerous details from the myriad of communities of practice I’m a part of. My psyche was swirling with thoughts of tasks that I had to complete at work that day, I was processing the ideas and discussions in our class the evening prior, reminiscing about my conversation with a close friend two nights prior and thinking that I should call my other long-distance friends more. All while dodging other pedestrians on the sidewalk and obeying traffic signals at crosswalks. By the time I was half-way to work I knew that my stress levels were rising from just thinking about everything I needed to get done. Then it donned on me: Are our primate brains wired to withstand the demands and details of multiple communities of practice in a “city”? Have diverse communities of practice evolved faster than our primate brains?

As we have learned through reading Michael Tomasello’s The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (as listed on Chapters.ca) and through our discussions in class, we know that human society has evolved faster than the human species and as a primate species, humans are fairly young. So have our brains evolved quickly enough to keep up with the multiple demands we place on it in modern day society or are we becoming more stressed as we introduce more communities of practice to our lives?

As we read in Etienne Wenger’s Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (as listed on Chapters.ca) we don’t necessarily have to physically be “in” a community of practice in order to be a part of one. This can be problematic for the over-analysers and thinkers out there like me. At any given time I have multiple details about multiple items swirling around in my brain, largely unrelated to each other. We know that our human brains are robust enough to accommodate complex thinking and provide us with the capacity to recall important details, lessons, and events in our lives.  But how much is too much? Are we trying to accommodate so much that we’re putting undue stress on ourselves?

What's on your mind?

Workplace stress is a leading cause of stress in North America.  According to a 2010 Statistics Canada study (http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-008-x/2011002/article/11562-eng.htm), “slightly more than 1 in 4 Canadian workers described their day-to-day lives as highly stressful”. The majority of the people identified work as their main stressor. As Dr. Plumb discussed in class, people didn’t jobs that required them to work for money until a few hundred years ago; meaning that there was a huge community of practice with many sub-communities of practice that humans didn’t have to deal with. According to an article published in Biological Psychiatry by J. Douglas Bremner (Vol. 45, Issue 7, pages 797-805, 1 April 1999), an excess of stress can “result in damage to the hippocampus, a brain area involved in learning and memory, with associated memory deficits.” This could also explain why I only have the capacity to deal with a few stressful events at a time, easily forgetting details of non-related items when I’m experiencing stress.

Stressors of highly stressed employed population aged 20 to 64. Statistics Canada, 2010.

A second major contributing factor to human stress in North America is finances http://www.news-medical.net/news/2005/06/02/10637.aspx). People are worried about accumulating debt and how they’ll pay back the money they owe. Enter in the communities of practice within banks, loaning agencies, credit card companies, and so on. As I mentioned above, humans didn’t always work for money. Since currency wasn’t always used as a means of obtaining goods, people wouldn’t have had to worry about incurring monetary debt. As we know, there is a debt crisis in the Western world affecting millions of people. Humans are accruing more debt than ever before, which would lead me to conclude that humans are also experiencing more stress about finances than ever before, putting even more strain on our primate brains when we have to deal with our financial situations in banks or on the phone with customer service representatives.

Other causes of stress can include family and relationships, and major life changes such as career change or birth of a baby (http://www.heretohelp.bc.ca/publications/factsheets/stress). Although our ancestors would have had similar communities of practice with their families and others, and of course experience childbirth, I believe their communities of practice would have been much less detailed and layered. Hundreds of years ago, humans’ families all lived in the same place at the same time. They didn’t have to worry about keeping tabs on what they were doing from afar or figure out how to post pictures on Facebook for their relatives to see. Nor did they get thrust into the pressures of ensuring their children kept up with the latest styles and fads so that they fit in with their peers.

Although communities of practice provide humans with a sense of belonging and shared understanding, I do believe that the multi-layered “cities” or “multimembership nexus of perspectives” (Wenger, p. 105) we create in our lives is getting too intense for our primate brains. If people are becoming more stressed due to multiple demands of their overlapping communities of practice, causing damage to the hippocampus and memory loss, worst case scenario is that our transmission of culture would start to break down as a result of less communication and information sharing with each other. Perhaps our brains will evolve to withstand the added stress of complex cities of communities of practice one day. Until then, it’s up to us as members of the human species to take care of ourselves and deal with our stressors so we can stay healthy and transmit culture for generations to come.

We need to transmit culture to ensure viable communities of practice for generations to come.

Human Competitive Advantage through the Transmission of Culture

As we learned through reading Michael Tomasello’s The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (as listed on Chapters.ca), humans have thrived as a species and were able to evolve due to our capacity to share information with purpose and teach other. It is through the transmission of culture that humans have a competitive advantage and are able to progress as quickly as they did as a species on Earth.

Our ability to transmit culture and purposefully pass on lessons and tools from generation to generation has allowed humans to elude nature’s survival of the fittest that other species face. An interesting example that we discussed in class was Dr. Plumb’s mention of the fact that humans have been replicating caves since the days our ancestors lived in them full-time. I had never pondered why classrooms, boardrooms, and so on are usually set up with tables that seat everyone in a u-shape or a circle. I assumed that it was so all parties could engage in eye contact and to encourage open communication (which I’m sure is at least partially the reason). But what I hadn’t realized is that a conference room or classroom is a reproduction of a cave setting. All parties can sit in an enclosed space together without distraction of having to worry that there is danger or a predator behind them.

When you consider this notion further, you realize that human ability to transfer meaningful information and culture has literally helped us live longer. The advances in modern medicine and healthcare have increased an average human life expectancy at birth in America from 58 years for men and 62 years for women in 1938 to 74 years for men and 80 years for women in 2001 (http://www.prb.org/pdf06/NIA_FutureofLifeExpectancy.pdf).  As noted in the article, life expectancy for the other G8 countries is following the same trend.  People in developed countries are living longer, healthier lives. New drugs are being developed to aid in the recovery from diseases and various ailments based on research that has been built upon and shared from one laboratory to the next over many decades.

This graph is a little blurry but you can read the full article this graph came from and view a clearer image on the StatsCan website: http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/82-229-x/2009001/demo/lif-eng.htm

 As humans, we are also unique in our use of tools in everyday life. As Johnson-Frey discusses in his minireview (http://pdn.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=MiamiImageURL&_cid=272195&_user=10&_pii=S0896627303004240&_check=y&_coverDate=2003-07-17&view=c&_gw=y&wchp=dGLzVlB-zSkzV&md5=1ef131adeeca1c16dccf90a1f50e295d/1-s2.0-S0896627303004240-main.pdf), human and nonhuman primate brains are similar but it is human ability to reason about an “objects’ physical properties and interactions” that likely explains humans ability for complex tool use (p. 2, 2003). I think Tomasello would agree. It is this same ability to understand an item’s multiple properties and how it can purposefully interact with other items that allows us to pass the information to our fellow humans. This cognitive benefit along with Tomasello’s “joint attentional scene” (p. 96, 1999) allows humans a huge competitive advantage as a species; we share best practices of complex tool use, innovate the tool use and pass it on for the next generation to improve on further.

In a basic context, reflect for a moment on the number of tools and utensils you currently have in your kitchen for preparing food.  We have sharp knives to cut our food, pots and pans to cook our food over heat, and numerous dishes to serve the prepared food in, not to mention the numerous kitchen gadgets to do just about any other task you desire (my favourite is a Magic Bullet – it helps you make the easiest smoothies, salsa, and guacamole http://www.buythebullet.com). All of these things have made us more efficient in preparing the food for our sustenance than our ancestors. Gone are the days of using sharp rocks to cut food, preparing everything by hand from scratch, and cooking over fires for our survival.

My favorite kitchen tool, the "Magic Bullet".

From our use of tools, came the development of weapons. As we know, early humans used weapons to hunt animals for food and to protect themselves from falling prey to animals. Knowledge of using objects for tools and tool use was an important part of culture that was passed from generation to generation (for an interesting quick read on the Ngadjonji aborigines of Australia’s tool and weapon use: http://earthsci.org/aboriginal/ngadjonji%20history/food/weapons/Weapons%20and%20Tools.htm).

Over time as societies have developed and progressed, so have weapons. Weapons for hunting prey became more robust and automatic in the form of shotguns and rifles, and personal weapons in the form of handguns are now commonplace.  And let’s not forget the emergence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and biological warfare. Weaponry has now advanced so far that sophisticated artillery is used in conflict and wars against each other. According to the NATO website, “The use or threatened use of weapons of mass destruction significantly influenced the security environment of the 20th century and will also impact international security in the foreseeable future”  (http://www.nato.int/docu/briefing/wmd/html_en/wmd04.html). As you can see, the advancement of weapons is so robust that we may end up harming the progress of the human species if the full capacities of weapons are unleashed against one another.

Have we gone too far in the development of weapons?

I’m sure we can agree that the culture that was passed on to us (including the tools and traditions in that culture) as we developed and the culture that surrounds us shapes our lives. The use of our advanced communication and cognitive skills as humans to collaborate with each other and transmit culture helps our species move forward. However, we are still fragile beings like every other living organism on Earth and are affected by others’ use of tools and weapons. As such, we need to ensure that major devastation to the species does not occur due to the use of weapons and super weapons. Hopefully our world leaders will continue to use their inherited reasoning and communication skills to prevent the use of weapons causing major devastation so the human species can continue to innovate and progress.

The Ratchet Effect and Day-to-Day Life

When I began reading Michael Tomasello’s The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (as listed on Chapters.ca), I quickly became interested in a concept that he briefly mentions early in the book. On page 5, Tomasello discusses human how practices are improved to the point that they cannot be reversed and then passed from one generation to another, modified by an individual or group of individuals over time, producing a “ratchet effect”. This was the first time I had heard about such an effect and thought the idea of “cultural ratcheting” was extremely interesting.

The first example of this form of social transmission that popped into my mind was the modern tradition of the Christmas holiday and a video a friend of mine had posted on Facebook in December regarding the history and origin of Santa Claus (click here to view the video in YouTube). Through this video I learned that the jolly old man I believed in as a child originated in Europe and is the result of North American culture merging a number of Christmas and winter characters into one persona. When the red and white-clad Santa went mainstream in America in 1930’s in Coca-Cola ads (http://www.thecoca-colacompany.com/heritage/cokelore_santa.html), the ratchet was set in place and there was no going back for the modern-day Santa Claus. I had a light bulb moment when I connected the two and started thinking about all of the things I take for granted in my day-to-day life that are the result of the ratchet effect.

A depiction of Santa Claus in a 1931 Coca Cola ad.

When you reflect on modern human life you come to realize that current North American lifestyles and daily life is shaped by ratchets in many contexts – traditions, technology, food procurement, shopping (the exchange of value for goods), education, and so on. To examine this further, let’s consider a normal day in my life: I wake up to a digital alarm clock that automatically plays the radio at a time I’ve programmed it to turn on. I shower in a bathtub that has hot running water with a turn of a tap, using cleansing products I purchased at a drugstore. I wear contact lenses to improve my vision and brush my teeth with an electric toothbrush. I eat cereal from a box with milk from a carton that I purchased from a grocery store. I walk to work in rubber-soled boots or shoes and a coat that I bought at a shopping mall. Walking to work, I wait to cross streets until I’m given the okay by automated stoplights and crosswalk signals. When I arrive at work (after taking an elevator up eight floors) I turn on my computer and check for a blinking light on my phone that will tell me if I have messages waiting or not. My computer automatically connects to the internet and I check my email inbox to see how many electronic messages I have received, then send a number of emails out. On most days, my work day will include the use of an online webinar program which I set up with a laptop that has a built-in webcam. A number of people from across the Maritimes, and sometimes from across the country, log into the webinar program and they take part in a seminar or we have a meeting. In the evenings, sometimes I meet my friends for dinner in a restaurant that prepares food from another country. I get to and from the restaurant by driving my four-door, automated transmission car that has a built-in car stereo and can play my iPod. Some other nights I’ll connect to Skype and talk to family and friends from different parts of the country or other countries.

I'm sure you get the point I'm trying to illustrate. When you really examine your daily life, you realize that life as we know it is the way it is due to our forefathers’ innovations and the ability to share knowledge with each other in order to keep building on these achievements because we’re human. Or we can say that daily life is a culmination of ratchets that were set throughout human history to the point that we are so dependent on the innovations that life wouldn’t be the same without them.

When I think of my parent’s generation (they were both born in the 1940s), they wouldn’t have been able to fathom as a child how different their children’s lifestyles would be from theirs. Or that they would be corresponding with their children over computers with something called “the internet”. When you really think about it, the amount of human advancement in terms of lifestyle and technology and how it forms daily life over the past 60 years has been incredible. However, although these advancements have been to the betterment of human society in the Western world, I can’t help but wonder how these advancements have been a detriment to the earth and its environment. Over time, humans have created an “easier” and “more convenient” lifestyle in the Western world, but in many cases, it has been to the detriment of the earth (think corporate-driven industries with no regard to how they affect the environment, mass production, over-harvesting). I couldn’t find any scholarly publications exploring this question but I think it would be an interesting topic for future research.

Will the harm that human advancement has caused the environment be reversible?

It will be interesting to see what advancements will be made over my lifetime and how the ratchet effect will affect my generation. Aside from technology, I hope that there will be further social movements that will provide positive change in sustainability efforts for a healthier planet to undo some of the harm mankind has imparted on the earth. Maybe if more people learned about the ratchet effect they could see how their life has been shaped by their forefathers and how their actions will affect the day-to-day lofe of those to come that we will share our history, our human race, and our planet with.