02__HOFFMAN.DOC
8/17/2007 9:23 AM
SINCE CHILDREN ARE NOT LITTLE ADULTS—SOCIALLY—WHAT’S AN ENVIRONMENTAL ECONOMIST TO DO? SANDRA HOFFMANN† I. INTRODUCTION In 1665, Diego Velázquez painted what was to become one of the great works of western art, Las Meninas. The large canvas portrays Velasquez painting the Infanta Margarita, daughter of King Phillip IV and Queen Mariana of Spain, along with members of the court. The work was completed at the height of belief in preformationism. Preformationism was an early theory of development that saw children as arriving into the world as miniature adults, physically and socially.1 In the painting, Infanta Margarita, who can be no more than five or six, appears all the miniature queen. Starting with Locke and Rouseau, preformationist conceptions of children’s social, cognitive, and moral development gradually gave way to a more complex 2 understanding of childhood as a sequence of developmental changes. 3 Preformationism was also a theory of biological development. Well into the 1990s, we could have said that U.S. environmental policy took a preformationist view of children—to the extent that children were considered at all. In fact, the rallying cry of the efforts to bring children’s health concerns into federal environmental policy was “children are not just little adults.” The driving concern behind this cry was that environmental standards were set based on the impact of environmental hazards on adult health. And yet, physiologically, children are not little adults. As children pass through complex developmental phases, they are affected by environmental
† Fellow, Resources for the Future. 1. WILLIAM CRAIN, THEORIES OF DEVELOPMENT, CONCEPTS AND APPLICATIONS 1 (5th ed. 2004); PHILLIPE ARIÈS, CENTURIES OF CHILDHOOD: A SOCIAL HISTORY OF FAMILY LIFE 33-34 (1962). 2. CRAIN, supra note 1 at 4-19. 3. Jane Maienschein, Epigenesis and Preformationism (Oct. 11, 2005), in STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY (2005), http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epigenesis/.
209