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ing another set of policy tools to use in preserving and restoring this country's <br />biological heritage. <br />Preserving the flora and fauna that characterize the American landscape, and the <br />evolutionary processes that created them, will require an attitudinal shift in the <br />way we value and use land. As we discovered with clean air and water, and <br />timber and oil, land is not an inexhaustible resource. It provides invaluable <br />functions for many aspects of human society, and for the natural world that <br />weaves through and supports our society. As it becomes more scarce, its use will <br />have to be better allocated so that it is truly put "to the highest and best use," in <br />the broadest sense of that phrase. Powerful legislation, such as the ESA, is one <br />way to guide and control the use of land. Government acquisition is a very <br />effective, albeit expensive, method for ensuring that land is put to desired conser- <br />vation uses. A third method is to use economic forces and prices to guide human <br />behavior in determining the proper uses for land. None of these methods has <br />proven singularly capable of attaining the right mix of economic development and <br />biological preservation. A national policy that integrates these methods seems an <br />inherently rational and much needed approach to ensuring sustainable economic <br />and biological health. <br />REFERENCES CITED <br />Anderson, Terry and Donald Leal. 1991. Free Market Environmentalism. Pacific Research <br />Institute for Public Policy, Westview Press. <br />Barton, Kathy. July 1993. The Land Trust Alliance, Personal Communication. <br />Baumol ,William and William Oates. 1988. The Theory of Environmental Policy. Cambridge <br />University Press. <br />Coase, Ronald. 1977. "The Problem of Social Cost," in Economics of the Environment: Selected <br />Readings, Dorfman and Dorfman (Eds.), W.W. Norton 8r, Company. <br />Dales, J. 1968. Pollution, Property and Prices, University of Toronto Press. <br />Dennis, Michael. 1985. "Federal Tax Code Opportunities to Maintain Wetlands," Transactions of <br />the North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference, No. 50, p. 449. <br />Edison Electric Institute. 1993. "Advance Release of Data," 1992 Statistical Yearbook of the <br />Electric Utility Industry. <br />Flather, Curtis. In Press. Species Endangerment Patterns in the United States, General Technical <br />Report RM-000, Rocky Mountain Forest and Range Experiment Station, U.S. Forest Service, U.S. <br />Department of Agriculture. <br />Friedman, Lee. 1984. Microeconomic Policy Analysis, McGraw-Hill. <br />Losos, Elizabeth. In Press. Species Endangerment and Federal Resource Subsidies: Taxpayers <br />Double Burden, The Wilderness Society. <br />16 <br />