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viability of our various economic endeavors. As a result, many types of develop- ment or extraction activities are undertaken that appear to make financial and economic sense, but that seriously harm the habitats supporting endangered species and overall biodiversity. Incorporating these social values into the calcu- lus of project profitability, through terms of price, would mean having enough social and financial information with which to make fully informed decisions. A complete consideration of these broader values would probably render many such activities unprofitable. This is the lesson western ecological economists are teaching in the developing world; the short-term economic gain derived from clearing another 20 hectares of rainforest, or from converting another 5 hectares of elephant habitat to cash crops, may not make long-term economic or social sense (Swanson and Barbier 1992). Such a lesson is equally applicable in the economic arenas of our own backyards. The use of economic incentives to motivate private parties to conserve important habitat on private lands becomes especially compelling when land ownership patterns and the distribution of endangered species in the United States are con- sidered. Nearly 80 percent of U.S. lands (excluding Alaska) are privately owned or held bynon-federal government entities. Roughly 95 percent of these lands are classified as rural and non-developed, some portion of which support habitat for biological resources at risk (Soil Conservation Service 1987). Of the 728 cur- rently listed federal endangered and threatened species, approximately 50 percent are found only on private lands. Another 20 percent of these species have at least half their known occurrences on private lands (Natural Heritage Data Center 1993). The distribution of the roughly 3,700 federal candidate species is not known, but may be assumed to follow roughly similar distribution patterns. The problem is compounded further by the way private land is evaluated in the United States. Neoclassical economics texts continue to teach that the value of land is nothing more than the revenue potential of its production capacity. The benchmark for land tax assessments is the "highest and best use" to which land can be put, which means determining the maximum likely revenue potential for each parcel of earth. The presence of endangered species habitat on private land is a liability that is scored in the debit column. Our task is to convert the tremen- dous value our society holds for endangered species and biodiversity into positive financial terms, so that these valuable biological resources will begin to be scored in the asset column (Repetto 1989). Our goal is to develop a system of economic incentives and disincentives that will affect the countless marginal decisions and considerations that constitute our private economy. Will farmer Jones convert another 20 acres of open meadow to row crops? Will developer Smith add another 100 units of housing to her project in southern Arizona? In the absence of prices that convey the full social, ecologi- cal, and biological costs of these decisions, these landowners will choose alterna- tives that maximize their short-term financial returns at the expense of the long- term, inter-generational interests of our society. On the other hand, positive 2