CHILDHOOD FORAGING AS A MEANS

OF ACQUIRING COMPETENT HUMAN

COGNITION ABOUT BIODIVERSITY

RAYMOND CHIPENIUK specializes in regional planning and resource develop-

ment (Ph.D., M.P1,) and English language and literature (M.A., B.A.). While conducting
the studies described in this article, he was an assistant professor in the institute of
Urban and Environmental Studies, Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada.
Most of his research is concemed with how environmental planning should take
account of cognitive adaptations to the incommensurability between nature and artifice.

ABSTRACT: With informants from metropolitan Ottawa and the Niagara Peninsula,
Canada, tests were made of the hypothesis that broad foraging for natural things in
childhood develops personal competence in assessing the biodiversity of local habi-
tats. Responses from initial groups of informants were used to compile region-specific
checkiists of natural kinds of things foraged. These checklists then became the basis
for questionnaires administered to samples of teenage informants, who were also
asked to complete a quiz indexing sense of biodiversity by comparing local habitats.
Mean breadth of foraging proves to be around 30 natural kinds, and the hypothesis
linking breadth of childhood foraging with sense of biodiversity, tested by analysis of
variance, is accepted at modest to fairly high confidence levels. Persons who forage
more natural kinds in childhood have a better sense of biodiversity as adults.

There is now a considerable academic literature on what lay

members of societies dependent on agriculture, industry, and

AUTHOR'S NOTE: For their contributions to my research | thank the students and
teachers of Bell High School, Ottawa, and E. L. Crossley and A. N. Myer Secondary
Schools, Fonthill and Niagara Falls, respectively; Bert Murphy and John Clipsham,
Niagara South Board of Education; Stephen Woodley, Parks Canada; faculty biolo-
gists at Brock University, St. Catharines; and my student assistants Mike DiRaddo and
Bob MacGregor. For methodological improvements | owe much in particular to Brent
Hall and Gordon Nelson, University of Waterloo; John Middleton, Brock University;
and two anonymous reviewers for this joumal. Some of the expenses of my fieldwork
were covered by research seed money from Brock University. Correspondence
should be addressed to 1343 Dowler Ave., Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1H 7R8.

ENVIRONMENT AND BEHAVIOR, Vol. 27 No. 4, July 1995 490-512

© 1995 Sage Publications, Inc.

490

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 Chipeniuk / CHILDHOOD FORAGING — 491

cities for their livelihood know about the environment or how they
think about it (e.g., Hausbeck, Milbrath, & Enright, 1992; Kellert,
1979; Krause, 1993). More still has been published on what
members of tribal societies know and think about nature (e.g.,
Nelson, 1983; Silberbauer, 1981; Toledo, 1991). Yet if anything
is critical in the search for solutions to the environmental crisis in
wealthy consumer countries, it is to ascertain what lay members
of agro-industrial-urban societies know and think about nature as
they experience it in their own lives; and research into that sub-
ject has not progressed very far.
Typically, recent studies into “environmental knowledge”
have concemed themselves with knowledge of social construc-
tions, artifacts, and abstractions rather than knowledge of
nature. As indexes of environmental knowledge, Lyons and
Breakwell (1994) measured science knowledge and knowledge
of industrial pollution. In the tasks they set for their preschool
subjects, Cohen and Horm-Wingerd (1993) construe “ecologi-
cal awareness” as centering on pollution and littering. In their
questionnaire, Arcury and Johnson (1987) posed questions
about landfill, radioactive waste, institutionally defined wild
rivers, the location of oil wells, and the like. Arcury, Johnson,
and Scollay (1986) asked informants about waste treatment,
water conservation, invisible pollutants, and dam failures.
Kellert (1985) probed knowledge of animals among children in
Connecticut, but his approach was to inquire about such things
as koala bears, whales, penguins, and tigers, which are, from
the point of view of membership in the local ecosystems these
children dwell in, just media images, as real as Donald Duck.
Correspondingly, with few exceptions (e.g., Harvey, 1989/90),
researchers have assumed that lay persons acquire their knowl-
edge about the environment, however that is defined, largely
through social intermediation. For instance, as their unique mea-
sure of exposure to information about the environment, Lyons
and Breakwell (1994) index TV science watching.
The purpose of this article is to report on a study carried on
within a somewhat different program of research into lay cog-
nition about the natural environment, one whose perspective
is that in appropriate circumstances human beings develop

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492 ENVIRONMENT AND BEHAVIOR / July 1995

some kinds of structured competence in their thinking about

nature without any truly cultural intervention at all.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

The theoretical framework is adaptationist (Bernhard, 1988;

Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). Certain expectations follow from the
well-established anthropological opinion that the human body
and mind evolved in adaptation to a hunting-gathering autecolo-
gy (Cosmides, Tooby, & Barkow, 1992). One of them is that the
behavior of children may manifest special cognitive adaptations
which would, in environments typical of those human beings
evolved in, ensure the development of normal competence in
thinking about natural things and natural landscapes (cf. Bell,
1991). Moreover, there should be some expression of these
inborn predispositions even when children grow up in contempo-
rary environments affording rather little contact with nature.
In fact, cognitive adaptations involving nature have already
been identified. Carey (1985), Gelman (1988), Keil (1989,
1991), and others have demonstrated that cognition involving
“natural kinds” of things follows a developmental trajectory
quite different from the path taken by cognition involving arti-
facts. From very early childhood, natural kinds are represented
mentally according to theories about their essences. Theory
building about the essences of natural kinds produces nature
lore that would be of great value to an adult creature that is a
broad-spectrum forager by ecological trade. Ideas about arti-
facts, on the other hand, shift from representation according to
characteristic features to representation according to defining
features, and do so quite abruptly when the child is about 6, 7,
or 8 years old (Keil, 1989). Artifacts are defined principally by
human intentions. That is, a chair is something made for peo-
ple to sit on, not something necessarily made of wood or of
steel or of plastic, with four legs or any legs at all. A taxi is a
vehicle intended to carry paying passengers over unscheduled
short hauls, whether the vehicle is an automobile or a boat.

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More generally, Heth and Cornell (1985, p. 216) place chil-

dren's searching behavior in the light of optimal foraging theo-
ry. They remark that “search is an adaptive process within the
context of finding and using resources.”
Adult adaptations to the ecological requirements for think-
ing about nature are also known. Anthropologists who study
folk science have concluded that there is a more or less
invariant human manner of classifying wild plants and ani-
mals (Atran, 1990; Brown, 1984). If a language lexicalizes
just one general botanical category, that category will be
trees, despite the fact that in Linnaean scientific classifica-
tion there is no such taxon as trees. If a language lexicalizes
two top botanical categories, one of them will be trees and
the other will be either grasses or a combination of grasses
and herbs (Brown, 1984). The sequence continues through
languages with 3, 4, and 5 highest level botanical categories,
and then stops. Similarly with animals, if there is a unique
life-form category, it is always birds, fish, or snakes; the
class of mammals is never lexicalized before the class of
birds; and so on. Field research indicates that languages
and cultures never classify abiotic natural things and arti-
facts in this fashion (Atran, 1990).
As reviewed by Ulrich (1993), scores of studies have
attested to the existence of a cross-cultural preference for
natural landscapes over those much altered by human
beings, other things being equal. In recent opinion, this pref-
erence is best explained as reflecting biological provisions for
human species-specific habitat selection (Parsons, 1991;
Ulrich, 1993; Orians, 1980). It is involuntary, but cognition is
entrained through judgments of naturalness (e.g., Kaplan %
Kaplan, 1989), which may be a mechanism for evaluating
potential productivity of landscapes from the point of view of a
hunter-gatherer (Chipeniuk, 1994).
Because of the crucial role foraging for a wide range of
wild plants and animals played in early human ecology, and
still plays in many contemporary cultures (e.g., Berlin et al.,
1983; Toledo, 1991), it is reasonable to suppose that some
cognitive adaptations require experience of foraging for their

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494 ENVIRONMENT AND BEHAVIOR/ July 1995

full development (again, cf. Bell, 1991). That is, if adult

human beings were (and are) adapted to gathering fruits,
seeds, roots, leaves, and stalks that are not easy to find or to
process for consumption, and cognitively specialized for the
task of capturing a wide variety of elusive animals, then
while they are immature they should be inclined to seek out
experiences entailing sensory exposure to the phenotypes,
autecologies, behaviors, and habitats of potential “resource”
species and the ways of living things generally. In such cir-
cumstances the immature mind would then develop ecologi-
cally suitable knowledge and structures of thought. As
Gelman (1991, pp. 314-315) observes, “children's skeletal
principles lead them to seek out nurturing data.” The impor-
tance of early exposure to exemplars is well attested to in
the development of other adaptations, such as human lan-
guage (Lenneberg, 1967).
Here two cognitive adaptations are suggested for human
foraging. One is a strong disposition in children to forage for
a wide variety of natural things, even in the absence of adult
instigation or favorable environments. The other is an onto-
genetic reliance on foraging in childhood to develop individ-
ual competence in assessing landscapes for their richness in
wild plant and animal resources—this richness, because of
the breadth of resources encompassed in late Paleolithic
human ecology, being all but identical to what biologists
think of as biodiversity. To test the plausibility of these hypo-
thetical adaptations, a program of research was carried out
as described below.
Very little previously published work associates childhood
foraging with environmental competence. Ethnographic work in
traditional cultures has been hamstrung by the assumption that
any knowledge deserving of notice is culturally transmitted (but
see Katz, 1989). As for foraging in agro-industrial societies,
apart from a single article on “urban foraging” as a teaching
device (Curry & Williams, 1978) and occasional passing refer-
ences to the fact that children do gather wild vegetation (e.g.,
Harvey, 1989), the subject seems to have escaped the atten-
tion of researchers.

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 Chipeniuk / CHILDHOOD FORAGING — 495

METHOD

Field studies were conducted in two locations, metropolitan

Ottawa and the Niagara Peninsula, Ontario. About 1 million
people live in and around Ottawa, yet the city has a hinterland in
which wild or thinly settled land extends almost to the urban
doorstep. By contrast, the cities of the Niagara Peninsula have
populations of less than 150,000, but the countryside in which
they are situated has been almost completely converted to agri-
culture, residential development, industry, transportation, and
closely supervised parks.
Operationally, foraging was taken to be a matter of gathering
and putting to some purpose a natural kind of thing. However,
what was quantified as the independent variable was not
extent of foraging per se but breadth of foraging, because the
number of acts of foraging for the same kind of thing could not
be reliably ascertained by recall or meaningfully aggregated
across various kinds. Furthermore, breadth of foraging should
be a better measure of how foraging exposes children to the
relative abundance of diverse life forms in different habitats.
Breadth of foraging was measured in two stages. In the first
stage, separately in each region, adult informants were given
questionnaires asking them to list all the wild plants, wild ani-
mals, fungi, and abiotic or nonliving natural materials they could
remember foraging for, either by themselves or in the family
context. The questionnaire furnished examples, such as pussy
willows under Wild Plants, toads under Wild Animals, and gold-
en chanterelles under Fungi. To ensure that informants had in
fact foraged for items and not just passively observed them,
they were also asked to state uses to which the items were put,
with illustrative uses that included “food” and “ornament.”
In the second stage, checklists of natural kinds of things for-
aged were compiled from the responses to the questionnaire
just described. The respective checklists were then adminis-
tered to high school students in Nepean, a suburb of Ottawa,
and Fonthill and Niagara Falls in the Niagara Peninsula. Space
was available for informants to add new items. Again, infor-
mants were asked to state uses for items they reported foraging

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Some sorts of places are home to more wild plants, wild mushrooms or fungi, and
wild animals, of more different kinds, than other sorts of features. Think back over
your travels in the Niagara district. For each of the following pairs of places, please
indicate the sort of place you e would have more wild things, of more kinds, with
an M, and the sort of place you believe would have fewer wild things, with less variety,
with an L. ltem Ois an example.

(0) A town M Agrainfam L

(1) A field in crop A pasture

(2) A forested valley A forested hilltop
(3) The middle of a lake Parts of a lake near the shore
(4) A pure hardwood bush A bush with a mixture of
hardwoods and evergreens
(5) A big stream A small stream
(6) Flat farm country Hilly farm country
(7) The middle of a large woodlot The edge of a large woodlot
bordering a field
(8) A pond with a stream A pond with no stream
flowing in and out flowing in or out
(9) A small woodlot A large woodlot
(10) A lake with lots of points A lake with a few points and bays
and bays
(11) A patch of forest An old pine plantation
(12) A pond that is mostly very deep A pond that is mostly shallow but
that has one deep area
(13) A lakeshore or river bank A lakeshore or river bank
with no cottages on it with a few cottages on it
(14) Forest that has never Forest where loggers made a few
been logged clearings a few years ago
(15) A field abandoned a year ago A field abandoned five years ago
(16) A cattail marsh A comfield

[Correct answers:(1) L M; (2) M ; (3) L M; (4) LM; (5) M L; (6) LM; (7) LM: (8) ML; (9 LM;
(10) ML; (11) M L; (12) LM; (13) L M; (14) LM (15) LM; (16) M L)
Figure 1: Biodiversity Quiz (Niagara Version)

for. The rationale for choosing teenagers as informants for the

second stage of the study was that they would have concluded
cognitive development and they would be mature enough to
understand the questionnaire, yet their memories of childhood
foraging would be fresh.
Another section of the second survey instrument was a quiz
to assess informants’ sense of biodiversity in their home biore-
gion. Informants were asked to consider 16 pairs of local habi-
tat types, such as “a bay of a lake” versus “the middle of a

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 Chipeniuk / CHILDHOOD FORAGING — 497

lake,” and to indicate which they felt would be home to more

wild plants and animals of more different kinds (Figure 1).
“More wild plants and animals of more different kinds” renders
in a common sense way the two dimensions technical indexes
of biodiversity strive to measure, namely variety of species
and relative abundance of individuals in species (Magurran,
1988). Characterization of habitat types was deliberately
expressed in universal terms to force the informant to abstract
from all the memories he or she could command. However,
the habitat types were specific to local ecosystems and the
quiz for the Niagara region therefore differed in several habitat
pairs from the quiz for the Ottawa district.
One local ecologist, a Ph.D., reviewed the quiz for the Ottawa
region. Five local ecologists, all Ph.D.s, evaluated drafts of the
quiz for the Niagara region. Only habitat pairs on which there
was unanimity or near unanimity were included.
For the Niagara region, information was also elicited on
childhood gathering of artifacts. In a procedure exactly parallel
with that employed for foraging for natural kinds, informants
responded to a checklist of “sorts of artifacts (things made by
people)” they could remember having searched for and collect-
ed or used. Instructions emphasized that the sorts checked off
should not include those bought or received from someone
else. Space was again provided for a description of uses.
The purpose of an index to breadth of artifact gathering was
to provide a control for the foraging of natural kinds. Both sorts
of activities entail curiosity, spontaneous searching, collecting,
and use. Both sorts of self-reports involve memory, intelli-
gence, and no doubt other shared psychological characteris-
tics. Hence any apparently meaningful statistical relationship
between foraging and sense of biodiversity could more confi-
dently be attributed to uniquely potent developmental proper-
ties of natural kinds if no similar relationship obtains between
gathering of artifacts and sense of biodiversity. Two other con-
trol procedures, applied in minor collateral studies, are treated
briefly in the results section of this article.
Ottawa informants were allowed to take protocols home to fill
out at their leisure over a period of 2 to 4 weeks. Niagara infor-
mants completed the protocols in the classroom in the space of

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approximately 1 hour, with the same research assistant adminis-

tering the exercise in each case.

RESULTS

In the less rigorous and less extensive Ottawa round of

the study, conducted in April 1993, 39 students in two class-
es of Grade 10 students returned questionnaires in which
the foraging checklist had been completed with accompany-
ing uses; 32 also did the biodiversity quiz. Mean age of the
39 was 14.8 years, the range was 13 years to 16 years. The
two participating classes included students from the full
range of academic abilities. Females in the sample outnum-
bered males 31 to 8, purely because of response rates. All
but one of the informants had lived in the Ottawa area for at
least 4 years; about three quarters had lived there all their
lives. Students at the school where the survey was adminis-
tered are drawn from outlying towns and farms as well as
urban and suburban areas.
The checklist these informants worked with comprised 211
natural kinds, more or less; a few categories were subsets of
others and the use of popular rather than scientific names
sometimes made it difficult to be certain two kinds were not
really the same kind. As individuals, the teenagers reported a
respectable breadth of kinds foraged: mean 33.5, range 3 to
82, standard deviation 20.0.
For the 32 informants who completed the Ottawa biodiversity
quiz, the mean score was 11.7 correct responses out of the 16
possible, or 73%. Standard deviation was 1.4, the range 8 to 14.
Finally, to test for the hypothesis that childhood foraging
develops a sense of biodiversity, nonparametric ANOVAs were
performed on foraging and quiz results. When scores were
converted to ranks according to standard deviations from the
mean and analyzed with the Kruskal-Wallis (K-W) one-way
analysis of variance, the hypothesis was supported at the 99%
confidence level (corrected for ties, y? = 11.9). Subsequently,
for the sake of consistency with the later Niagara study, forag-

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 Chipeniuk / CHILDHOOD FORAGING — 499

ing totals were divided into those above and those below the
median and the Mann-Whitney (M-W) rank-sum test was per-
formed on variance with raw quiz scores, as discussed below.
Results fell just below significance.
In the Niagara round, conducted in April 1994, seven classes
of high school students participated, most of them in Grade 11.
Two were unlike the others in that students in them were taking
a course in urban and environmental studies and had received
several periods of instruction in biodiversity. Hence the returns
were divided into a main sample (Classes 1 through 5) of 84
informants and a by-sample (Classes 6 and 7) of 28.
Of the 84 students in the Niagara main sample, 80 included
personal data. Among the 80, 44 (55%) were female, 36 (45%)
were male. Mean age was 16.6 years, mean number of years
resident in the Niagara region was 13.6 years.
Classes 1 through 3 and 5 were in a school drawing stu-
dents from the fringes of St. Catharines, a city of about
130,000. Classes 4, 6, and 7 were in a school serving residents
of a large and prosperous town and rural families in outlying
areas. However, in this heavily humanized landscape, the dis-
tinction between town and country is not very meaningful.
When results from classes were analyzed separately, Class 4
closely resembled the other classes of the main sample,
though it was “rural” and they were “urban.”
The checkiist of natural kinds for the Niagara region, compiled
from 15 adult primary informants as opposed to 50 as in the
Ottawa case, included only 136 items. The checklist for artifacts,
similarly compiled, included 38 kinds. Informants wrote in about
a dozen additional natural kinds and three or four artificial kinds.
Results for Niagara, displayed in Table 1, resembled those
for Ottawa. Mean number of natural kinds foraged by the main
sample (N = 84) was 31.6, the range 11 to 81. Mean number
of artifacts was 9.8, range 1 to 35. Mean score on the biodi-
versity quiz was 11.5 (72% correct), range 7 to 16. Some idea
of a modal foraging repertory can be had from Figure 2.
Scores were dichotomized as above or below the medi-
ans. When the M-W ANOVA was applied to the hypothesis
that broad foraging for natural kinds helps produce sense of

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TABLE 1
Foraging for Natural Kinds and Gathering of
Artifacts, Sense of Biodiversity, and Analysis of Variance

M-W ANOVAs
(Biodiversity
Quiz Score With
Natural Artificial Natural or
Kinds Kinds — Biodiversity — Artificial Kinds
Foraged Gathered Quiz Scores [Kinds Above vs.
Sample N (Mean) (Mean) (Mean) Below Median])

Ottawa, Classes 1-2 32 335 — 17 natural random

artificial N/A
[K-W natural < .01]
[K-W artificial N/A]
Standard deviation 200 — 14

Niagara, Class 1 18 312 1.7

Niagara, Class 2 16 315 10.9
Niagara, Class 3 14 326 109
Niagara, Class 4 16 354 121
Niagara, Class 5 20 27.8 11.8

Niagara main sample — 84 1.5 natural < .01

artificial random
Standard deviation 136 6.2 1.9
Niagara by-sample
Classes 6-7 28 385 10.8 1.1 natural random
artificial random
Standard deviation 16.3 59 21
Niagara total sample — 112 332 10.0 11.4 natural < .05
artificial random
Standard deviation 145 6.1 20

biodiversity, results were significant at a two-tailed probabil-

ity of .027. Thatis, broad foragers do better than narrow for-
agers on the biodiversity quiz (mean rank 48 vs. 38, W =
1955, U = 669) more often than chance predicts. Because
of low dispersion on the quiz scores, exaggerating the con-
sequences of small distances from the median, an M-W
ANOVA was also performed on dichotomized foraging
scores but raw quiz scores. Results were significant at a
two-tailed probability of .009 (mean rank 50 vs. 36, W =
2030, U = 595).

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Kind of wild plant Use Foraged in Niagara?

Acoms To throw X
Apple To eat X
Cattails Decoration X
Clover Four leaf—luck X
Crab apples To throw X
Dandelions Picked for Mom X
Driftwood Carved for a sculpture X
Pinecones Crafts X
Pussy willows Gave to Mom X
Raspberries To eat X
Roses Gave to Mom X
Strawberries Ate X
Violets, yellow Gave to Mom X
Kind of wild mushroom or fungus
Puffballs, common Puffed X
Kind of wild animal Use Foraged in Niagara?
Ants Ant fam X
Bass, rock Fishing X
Bass, smallmouth Food X
Caterpillars Keep as pets X
Catfish Fishing X
Crayfish Used for bait X
Daddy longlegs Pulled off legs X
Earthworms Used for bait
Fireflies Caught in jars
Frogs and tadpoles Used as bait x
Mice Brought home X
Perch, yellow Fishing X
Pickerel (or walleye) Fishing
Pike Fishing
Potato bugs Played with x
Praying mantises Made them fight X
Snakes, garter Kept for pet X
Sunfish Fishing X
Turtles, snapping Kept for pet X
Other natural kinds Use Foraged in Niagara
Birds' nests Brought home X
Feathers Acted as Indian X
Atifacts Use Foraged in Niagara
Arrowheads Used as necklace X
Bottle caps, beer Collected X
Bullet casings Collected X
Coins, old Collected x
Golfballs Collected from driving range X
Popsicle sticks Crafts x
Tennis balls For hockey X
Tinfoil (from cigarettes) Foil ball X

Figure 2: “Modal” Example of Childhood Foraging and Gathering: Class 3, 446

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502 ENVIRONMENT AND BEHAVIOR / July 1995

When ANOVAs were performed in the same fashion on the

variance between foraging for kinds of artifacts and sense of
biodiversity, results were random.
By itself, the Niagara by-sample of Classes 6 and 7 resulted
in ANOVAs random for both foraging of natural kinds and
gathering of artifacts. However, if Classes 6 and 7 are added
to the main sample to create a single overall Niagara sample
(N=112), the ANOVA on foraging for natural kinds and sense
of biodiversity is significant at probability less than .05, broad
foragers scoring higher than narrow ones on the biodiversity
quiz, rank by rank; on foraging for artifacts and the biodiversi-
ty quiz, the ANOVA is random.
Numerical differences between males and females were
negligible.

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS

Clearly, most informants in the study groups have sought

out and used a fairly broad range of natural kinds of things,
sometimes spontaneously, sometimes because of their par-
ents, in a few instances because of teachers. When informants
report foraging few kinds, it is perhaps for lack of opportunity:
there is a substantial correlation between number of kinds for-
aged and years of local residence. If nothing else, foraging
must therefore be an important means by which children come
into contact with instances of local natural kinds.
Second, by the standards of the quiz, most informants in the
study groups have acquired a quite competent sense of biodi-
versity conceming the various habitats of the bioregion they live
in. What is more, they have evidently done so without formal
instruction about biodiversity. Because only the Niagara by-sam-
ple are known to have had such instruction and they obtained a
lower mean score on the biodiversity quiz (11.1) than did the
Niagara main sample (11.5), informal learning about the biodi-
versity of real habitats may be more effective than formal.
Third, it would appear that foraging is an important avenue by
Which children obtain learning experiences involving natural

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 Chipeniuk / CHILDHOOD FORAGING — 503

kinds and relative biodiversity of local habitats. For the study

samples, roughly, the wider the foraging, the better the sense of
biodiversity. It may be that childhood foraging experiences trig-
ger an intuitive sense of biodiversity in much the same way as
linguists believe early exposure to speech triggers the develop-
ment of grammar, or it may be that they provide learning oppor-
tunities through repeated and vivid exposure to examples of the
biodiversity of various habitats; or it may be both. Whatever the
case, an adaptationist interpretation remains viable.
Alternative explanations for the relationship between
breadth of foraging and sense of biodiversity are available but
not very convincing. That some underlying variable such as
diligence, strength of memory, or intelligence accounts for it is
rendered less likely at the outset by the consistently random
results from ANOVAs testing variance of biodiversity quiz
scores with breadth of foraging for artifacts.
Data from one of the collateral studies mentioned earlier has a
bearing on whether intelligence is an underlying variable in these
results. When a sample of 18 adult Niagara region Rotary Club
members completed the standard foraging questionnaire and
biodiversity quiz in May 1994, the ANOVA on foraging for natur-
al things was significant at a two-tailed probability of less than
.05. Although the ANOVA on gathering artifacts was random,
as usual, there were low correlations between years of educa-
tion and both quiz scores (Kendall's tau-c = .16) and foraging
(tau-c = .28). Consequentiy, to the extent that years of education
reflect intelligence, greater intelligence may indeed issue in both
broad foraging, or at least good recollection of kinds foraged,
and high scores on the biodiversity quiz. But which intelligence:
verbal, mathematical, spatial, or some other? If intelligence is
modular and sense of biodiversity is a component in some poor-
ly known module of natural-kind intelligence, then this explana-
tion may not differ from an adaptationist one.
Another possibility is that mere interest in nature might pro-
duce an impulse to forage at the same time as it stimulates a
child's desire to observe the relative biodiversity of habitats. In
May 1994, as a limited test of this competing “curiosity” hypoth-
esis, 20 students in a Niagara high school performed an exer-

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cise like the standard one in all respects other than that they
were additionally invited to check off natural kinds they could
recall having “just observed or paid attention to.” “Just
observed or paid attention to” was elaborated as meaning the
informant had just looked at the wild kind close up, or listened
to or smelt it, without keeping it or making use of it in any way.
Further comment made it clear that “just observed” was a pos-
sible answer even for kinds the informant could recall having
also foraged for. For natural kinds foraged, the ANOVA on bio-
diversity quiz scores had a two-tailed probability of less than .1,
with high-ranking foragers scoring high on the quiz. For natural
kinds “just observed” but exclusive of kinds also foraged, the
probability was less than .3, with opposed ranks. For natural
kinds just observed and inclusive of kinds also foraged, the
probability was .9. In other words, mere interest in natural
kinds, if the just observing index does it justice, was associated
with less competence in thinking about biodiversity, so if any-
thing, it counteracts the effects of foraging.
A factor definitely shared between childhood foraging and
sense of biodiversity is parental influence. As illustrated by
the modal foraging list of Figure 2, parents can elicit foraging
behavior in their children. Informants often cite giving
instances of a kind to their mother as a use (seldom to their
father). In welcoming the gift, parents may both reinforce the
behavior and communicate their attitudes towards nature. In
a study reported in Chipeniuk (1994), a large proportion of
informants mentioned their parents in self-reports on where
they believed their attitudes to nature had come from, espe-
cially if the attitudes toward nature were positive, as most of
them were.
It is true that even in hunter-gatherer societies adults make
little deliberate effort to teach young children to differentiate
among wild plants and animals, and children show a strong
inclination to participate in family foraging and to forage on their
own without their parents requiring it of them (e.g., Lee, 1979;
Marshall, 1976; Shostak, 1981; Wentzel, 1991). Katz (1989,
p. 49) comments that when she asked Sudanese children
where they learned about the plants they foraged for, “it ap-

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 Chipeniuk / CHILDHOOD FORAGING — 505

peared to them that their knowledge was not so much leamed

as taken in with the air.” But parents may control leaming oppor-
tunities by determining whether certain types of foraging will
take place at all, such as fishing for lake trout, hunting moose, or
picking mushrooms, where travel or skill are required.
Whether parental influence is a dominant factor in the rela-
tionship between childhood foraging and sense of biodiversity
remains to be seen. A quite different methodological approach
will be necessary to settle the question.
To continue with discussion of results, the fourth point is that
some sorts of foraging may be more effective than others in
developing sense of biodiversity. With the Niagara main sample,
ANOVAs done on breadth of animal kinds foraged are almost an
order of magnitude more significant than those for plant kinds.
On the other hand, foraging for fungi shows no significant rela-
tionship with sense of biodiversity. One might expect that forag-
ing done across habitats ranging from highly disturbed to nearly
undisturbed would be more heuristic than foraging, for however
many kinds, restricted to purely urban habitats.
Fifth, whereas broad foraging for natural kinds is usual,
broad gathering of artificial kinds is not. Not only is the mean
for artificial kinds low, at about 10 versus 33 for natural kinds,
but many informants report little or no artifact scavenging
behavior. Of course, in contemporary agro-industrial societies,
children or their parents can satisfy a desire for intimacy with
artifacts, such as toys, by buying them. But people can also
buy pets or house plants or garden seeds, which are natural
kinds with some artificial features.
Sixth, the fact that informants who have been formally
instructed in biodiversity do no better on the biodiversity quiz
than those who have not (mean score for main sample 11.5,
for by-sample 11.1) is surprising only at first sight. Formal
instruction is on the principles of biodiversity, not on the intu-
itive reading of local landscapes. To read the biodiversity of
landscapes with real insight takes years of personal acquain-
tance, not a few hours in a classroom.
Seventh, although the Ottawa and Niagara samples are
small, they reveal what seem to be some peculiar regulari-

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ties. The coincidence in mean number of natural items for-

aged, 33.5 as compared with 31.6, is striking, especially in
view of how results for individual classes also fluctuate
around means of about 32. Possibly related is the fact that
most of the variance in biodiversity quiz scores is used up in
the step from foraging scores below 20 kinds to those above.
It is as if children are unsatisfied until they reach a certain
minimum breadth of foraging, that point also being the one at
which gains in competence in thinking about local biodiversi-
ty level off, as measured by the quiz.
On the other hand, regional differences in the content of for-
aging repertories are pronounced. A detailed comparison has
not yet been made, but one can say, by way ofillustration, that
although high percentages of informants in both groups report
foraging for pussy willows, many other kinds are region specif-
ic in how commonly they are foraged, or in whether they are
foraged at all. Nearly everyone in the Ottawa sample, but not
the Niagara, has foraged for wild blueberries. Only informants
in the Niagara sample have foraged for sassafras. Herein lies
one of the sources of bioregional identity.
Some regional comparisons are worrisome. Every human
settlement presents children with a unique set of environmen-
tal conditions. Situated between farm country and the still fair-
ly intact ecosystems of the Canadian Shield, metropolitan
Ottawa-Hull affords children who grow up in it some unusually
good opportunities for foraging and for comparing the richness
of wild plant and animal life of various habitats. The drastically
degraded Niagara Peninsula may be more typical of the eco-
logical settings in which most North American children now
find themselves. Yet Niagara does not represent the extreme
intensity of land use of Toronto, Chicago, or New York, where
foraging is hard to do or out of the question near home, and
getting well out of the influence of a city is something increas-
ing numbers of children seldom do. In these places urban
environments may be so “unnatural” in the sense explained by
Symons (1979) that children growing up in them cannot
engage in foraging to the extent necessary for them to acquire
a basic competence in biodiversity.

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Megalopolitan children will preponderate in the societies

among which future constituencies for nature must be found.
To throw light on whether some environments are too artificial
to develop children's sense of biodiversity properly, foraging
and sense-of-biodiversity studies need to be carried out among
informants who have grown up in giant conurbations, among
other, less extreme environments.
Should further studies bear out the apparent relationship
between childhood foraging and competence in assessing
biodiversity, the implications will be considerable. For the past
generation, environmental education has been based on the
premise that “a general understanding of the basic principles
of ecology, the principles that govern the relationship of all liv-
ing things to their environment, is the key to an understanding
of environmental problems, whatever they may be” (Kupchella
& Levy, 1975, p. 3). Results from the present study, as well as
reviews casting doubt on the idea that children learn much
besides economic technique from conscious instruction
(Jahoda 8 Lewis, 1988), suggest that teaching abstract eco-
logical principles may not be the best way to promote environ-
mental competence in lay citizens. Instead, perhaps the
emphasis should be on certain critical cognitive abilities which
arise spontaneously and inevitably so long as conditions are
conducive to children's seeking out appropriate sorts of expe-
rience on their own.
The trouble is that increasingly, planning institutions create
conditions that are not suitable. Urban densities are deliberate-
ly intensified; more and more, provincial and state jurisdictions
frown upon or actually forbid foraging and other sorts of direct
contact with nature (Ontario Wildlife Working Group, 1991);
educational materials convey the oblique message that it is
wrong for an individual to make use of wild plants or animals
unless someone else has first processed and packaged them.
Wilson (1992, p. 15) has described biodiversity as “the key to
the maintenance of the world as we know it.” If in fact children do
much of their learning about biodiversity and about the effects
people have on biodiversity by making use of natural resources,
then societies pursuing the goal of sustainability might do better

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508 ENVIRONMENT AND BEHAVIOR / July 1995

to encourage childhood foraging. Obvious ways in which they

might do so are by providing and designating urban areas
where children are free to forage; by permitting and promoting
foraging on public land in hinterland areas; and by cultivating
traditions of family foraging of the sort prevalent in Scandinavia.
Mere foraging experience and mere possession of a strong
sense of biodiversity are not enough to render a person unwill-
ing to destroy the richness of nature. Deliberate undertakings
to promote foraging should therefore be accompanied by an
ideology of conservation and preservation. Needless to say,
some species, for instance North American wild orchids,
ought never be foraged. However, many other species can
withstand quite intensive foraging without sustaining signifi-
cantly harmful effects. For example, the widespread gathering
of wild mushrooms in Europe seems to have made no impres-
sion on the survival of mycelia (Arnolds, 1991).
Concerning the possibility that foraging might instill exploitive
habits of mind in children, Harvey (1989) has concluded that the
more varied children's contact with vegetation, the less likely
they are to believe people can manipulate the environment with
impunity. Historically, it is striking that many, if not all, of the great
literary prophets of love of nature were foragers in their youth or
as adults. Of the father of the English Romantic movement,
which some would say commenced the chain of events leading
to modern environmentalism, De Quincy (1834-40/1961) states
that “Wordsworth, like his [boyhood] companions, haunted the
hills and the vales for the sake of angling, snaring birds, swim-
ming, and sometimes of hunting. . . . It was in the course of
these pursuits, by an indirect effect growing gradually upon him,
that Wordsworth became a passionate lover of nature. ...”
In The Prelude Wordsworth tells how “ . . . 't was my joy/ With
store of springes o'er my shoulder hung/ To range the open
heights where woodcoks run....” Henry Thoreau picked
berries, fished for pickerel at Walden Pond, and ate woodchuck.
John Muir hunted birds’ nests in Scotland (Teale, 1954). Ernest
Thompson Seten hunted wolves in North Dakota, as did Aldo
Leopold in Arizona. In fact, by his own account (Leopold, 1949,
p. 130), it was hunting wolves that taught Leopold it was unwise
to hunt wolves to extinction. Loren Eiseley (1970) speaks of how,

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when he was a child on the American prairie, boys played with

sunflower spears in wild sunfiower forests; that image becoming
transmuted into a metaphor for “love of earth.” A close reading of
Reiger (1986) reveals that virtually all leading actors in the early
American conservation movement were enthusiastic foragers in
their youth.
Ethnobiologists Nabhan and Trimble (1994) worry that chil-
dren deprived of extensive direct contact with natural things,
including foraging, may grow up with what they call a “politi-
cally correct” but ungrounded conservation ethic. Plainly, they
fear dissociation from nature more than they do the imprinting
of bad habits of exploitation.
Many indigenous societies are highly regarded for their wis-
dom conceming right relations between human beings and
nature (Durning, 1992). Westerners especially, and properly,
admire hunter-gatherer people in this respect, at the same
time as they imagine they themselves can somehow live with-
out making use of natural things (Wentzel, 1991). Results
from the present study indicate agro-industrial-urban cultures
might gain in understanding of nature and of themselves if
they were to recognize the advantages of providing ample for-
aging opportunities for their children.

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