ABSTRACT
Programs to conserve ecologically valuable land and ensure envi-ronmental services are major sources of government and nonprot spending in the United States and throughout the world. At the federal level, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Conservation Reserve Program planned to spend upward of $1.8 billion in 2010 (USDA, 2009), while the most recent Farm Bill (2008-2012) included $11.7 billion for conservation purposes (Claassen, 2009). State and county programs have spent more than $2 billion on permanent agricultural conservation easements in a recent 25-year period (American Farmland Trust, 2010), and open-space referenda for all of the United States authorized $31 billion between 1996 and 2009 (Trust for Public Lands, 2009). As of 2005, private land trusts had protected 37 million acres (Aldrich and Wyerman, 2006). e European Union (EU) anticipated spending €35.4 billion on “agri-environmental” programs between 2007 and 2013 (EU, 2009), while China’s Sloping Land Conversion Program has a budget estimated at $48 billion (Xu et al., 2010).
