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For rural indigenous communities, the ways structural modernization, exposure to Western-scientific epistemologies, and formal schooling affect environmental reasoning remain unclear. For one Kichwa community in the Napo region of Ecuador, daily routines have re-oriented toward formal schooling while environmental learning opportunities remain intact. Here, although a Species Interaction Task elicited consensus across ages on inferred ecological interactions, younger people reasoned differently than did older people: for youth, animal interactions with flora were considered damaging, not neutral. Aspirational practices like schooling can thus reorient environmental reasoning, even in contexts in which young people share cultural understandings of local ecological relationships with adults. Data Notes a transition that occurred in her own youth. By 2012, she and three generations of her family lived in a community of 18 nuclear families that formed an extended-family household cluster (in Kichwa, ayllu llakta) carved out of dense, hilly rain forest on the south bank of the Napo River in Eastern Ecuador. In 1992, with the blessing of the Ecuadorian government and funding from the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), an Americanrun non-governmental organization had shown up to make the community, Sacha Loma—the administrative hub of a network of 26 public schools along the Napo River corridor. When she was just a small child, her parents Pepe and Micaela made the decision to move from their farm—about one kilometer inland from the river—to the riverbank to send their children to school to avoid what Journal of Ecological Anthropology Vol. 20 No. 1 2018 they described as the “treacherous” hour-long walk. Previous work documenting intergenerational changes in ecological reasoning shows links between ecological knowledge and ecological reasoning. Ross (2002), for example, shows that of the two adult generations of Lacondon Maya in the community of Mensäbäk, Chiapas, Mexico, younger adults both learn less about their biotic environment, and also learn differently. These adult generations were different along many lines: while the older generation of adults came of age in a sparselypopulated forest context close to their agricultural fields and with full access to other ecological learning opportunities, the younger generation chose to live in a densely-settled community setting with running water and electricity. Their agricultural fields, if still maintained, were located far away and rarely visited. Ross (2002:126) claims that younger adults have begun to give less credence to a traditional framework based upon “right behavior” guided by hächäkyum, the Lacandon Maya creator god, and were concomitantly ramping up the credence given to scientific epistemologies and local environmental non-governmental organizations. While Ross (2002:136) very reasonably attributes intergenerational ecological knowledge-reasoning linkages to disruptions in the ecological learning opportunities available to younger adults, in this manuscript I explore the possibility that ecological knowledge is subject to an ideological dynamism that is largely independent of its content. On this account, the ecological knowledge base is highly susceptible to changes in how knowledge comes to be made sense of for young people with new kinds of habitual routines that, while not wholly restructuring ecological “learning opportunities,” do implicate the value of local ecology in new ways. While people in Sacha Loma have changed their settlement patterns, they have not changed the fact that they still live within the rain forest. Maximiliana’s quote above, then, might be considered just as ideological as it is factual: her comment reflects not the lack of opportunities to come into close contact with the local biotic world, but rather the reorientation of community-level habitual practice away from what she refers to as “work” (e.g., hunting and agricultural labor) in favor of “village life.” REORIENTING TO VILLAGE LIFE To what is Maximiliana referring as village life? In 2012, Sacha Loma was not served directly by any roads and did not have access to Ecuador’s national electricity grid. All significant travel was by motorized canoe, and all electricity was produced with three diesel-powered generators. However, because young people attended school and adults had occupations that kept them within the community, for most residents an average day did not include travel into the forest. There were only three community households in which at least one of the parental adults did not have something other than forest work as their main occupation. These occupations included school janitor (three people), clinic intake nurse (one person), canoe driver (four people), schoolteacher (two people), store owner (three people), and eco-lodge cook (two people). Most adult women were charged with taking care of young children and performing housework. Though every family had farmland and both subsistence and cash crops, only one couple made farm work a daily, full-time occupation. The gravitational pull of the school’s “promise” has fundamentally restructured habitual environmental practice for all members of the community. Though this community reorientation was farreaching, it still took place in a context in which young people had consistent access to local biota. School standards, though, indexed a clear division between town activities and forest activities. Students traveling to school went to great lengths to stay meticulously free of the omnipresent rain forest mud, wearing a uniform that included a white polo shirt, dark blue dress pants for boys or skirt for girls, and black dress shoes. People going to their farms, Shenton / Forest Learning on the other hand, were readily apparent from their knee-high rubber boots and machete. Students’ routines, however, still involved travel to farms and agricultural work during weekends and school breaks. Local plants and animals were also an unavoidable presence in the community and surrounding forest—sloths, large constrictor snakes, howler monkeys, pygmy marmosets, agoutis, giant earthworms, river dolphins, ocelots, otters, and all manner of birds and bats were just some animal kinds that I, as a semi-casual observer, witnessed in or around the community during my time there. What Sacha Loma presents to the researcher interested in cultural formations of ecological understandings is a window onto the subtle reorienting effects that changes in habitual practice have on young learners making the transition to compulsory State-mediated schooling. This study examines one particular way in which students who are making this transition reinterpret their ecological context in a manner consonant with the new motivations and aspirations linked to school attendance. Foundational ethnographic work on the ways in which formal schooling functions as a Statemediated conduit to transmit a habitus particular to its vision of modernity has been conducted in the Ecuadorian Amazon (Rival 2002), and indicates that for the Huaorani, this habitus has come to convey prestige. On the flip-side, anthropological studies of environmental learning in children are few and far between (Zarger 2010), and studies that examine the intersection of environmental learning and culture change are even rarer. Reviewing this literature, Zent (2013:227) claims that the impact of formal schooling on environmental learning is inconsistent, with studies variously showing either knowledge loss or even enhancements in environmental knowledge. Zarger (2010:360) appreciates that schooling functions to radically restructure environmental learning opportunities for young indigenous people and—by linking the structure of such learning opportunities to processes of globalization—speculates that such reorientations in attention and learning should impact what young people know about their local ecologies. Here, I investigate the intersection of ecological knowledge, valuation of that knowledge, and the practice of schooling with a version of the Species Interaction Task (see, for example, Atran et al. 2002), which elicits patterns of ecological reasoning by asking participants to make causal inferences about hypothetical interactions between pairs of local species. While trivial to administer and for participants to understand, it is designed such that—because of the huge number of potential species interactions—it prompts respondents to generate an ad hoc inference of how the species might interact. The resultant patterns of reasoning, if consistent across sub-groups, should reveal broader cultural frameworks regarding the nature of ecological relationships. CONDUCTING THE STUDY Stimuli consisted of ten animals and ten plants (100 pairings). The species chosen for the task were generated from a plant and animal free listing pilot task (see Table 1 for species list). The salience of the items in the task was ensured by including items that appeared on multiple free lists and asking about the participant’s familiarity with each species before administering the task. Human being was also added to the animal list to interrogate understandings of human environmental influence on plant species. For each interaction, a three-part response was elicited in Spanish.2 The animal-plant pair was presented to the participant, who was then asked whether the animal affects or doesn’t affect (Spanish, afecta o no afecta) the plant. If the subject responded yes, the subject was next asked to indicate if the animal helps, hurts, or affects but neither helps nor hurts (Spanish, ayuda, daña, o afecta pero ni ayuda ni daña) the plant. These response options represent four qualitatively distinct types of effect that an animal might have: helping (i.e., helps), damaging (i.e., hurts), neutral (i.e., affects but neither helps nor hurts), or doesn’t interact (i.e., does

Going to School in the Forest: Changing Evaluations of Animal-Plant Interactions in the Kichwa Amazon