CHILDHOOD FORAGING AS A MEANS OF ACQUIRING COMPETENT HUMAN COGNITION ABOUT BIODIVERSITY

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 habitats. Responses from initial groups of informants were used to compile region-specific checklists 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.