Childhood foraging as regional culture: some implications for conservation policy

Natural resource planning theory now accepts that laypersons may acquire scientifically correct knowledge of nature by informal means and that sense of place, or ecological identity, motivates citizens to assume personal responsibility for their own bioregion. Previous research has identified childhood foraging, that is, searching for and using wild plants and animals of distinguishable kinds, as one informal means by which citizens learn about local ecosystems, but ethnographic evidence suggests foraging may also contribute substantially to the development of ecological identity. Does foraging reflect the ecological characteristics of local bioregions closely enough to structure ecological identity in industrial populations too? By way of addressing this question, studies were conducted to test predictions about the foraging repertoires of people growing up in two separate, but related, bioregions of Canada, centred on Niagara and Ottawa respectively. The most important of these predictions were, first, that regional patterns of foraging experience would correspond to regional ecological patterns, and second, that foraging repertoires would evince within-region similarities and between-region differences. Results confirm that the childhood foraging experience of ordinary Canadian citizens responds to important ecological parameters at the regional scale and in so doing constitutes an aspect of place-specific culture. These findings have a bearing on conservation policy, particularly for multicultural societies.