This book is about nature conservation – a topic that has increasingly captured the attention of academics, practitioners and the general public during the 1990s. However, while there has been much debate about the need to conserve natural areas and biological diversity and about the technical means of carrying out such conservation, attention has only just begun to turn to the economic, legal and institutional problems of conservation. It seems that the 64-million-dollar question is, how can we make nature conservation pay?

Innovative means of paying for nature conservation are emerging in the USA through the development of a private sector conservation ‘market’. Dealing in diversity examines the efforts of both profit and nonprofit making ventures and evaluates their success in combining cost effectiveness with sound conservation practice. The book comprises a carefully constructed mixture of theory and practice: examining economic and political theories of conservation, providing a diverse collection of interesting and instructive case studies and a valuable introduction to the operation of the conservation market by explaining the relevance of economic theory, organizations and legal and financial mechanisms for protecting natural areas. It evaluates the potential for maximizing conservation benefits while minimizing environmental costs by examining case studies, including fee-hunting, watchable wildlife, conservation real estate and landowner associations. Throughout its analysis of the conservation market the following points are specifically addressed: