Picture this: 300 million acres in the American West, an area as large as the entire eastern seaboard, converted into a sprawling stockyard.

Creeks and rivers are polluted and depleted of their flow. Vegetation and soil are trampled and stripped. Native wildlife has vanished, driven off by livestock that destroy their habitat. The dry land is made drier by grazing. Precious rainfall runs off the denuded landscape.

This bleak scenario is your tax dollars at work in 2002. It's also the subject of a new book edited by conservationists George Wuerthner and Mollie Matteson.

Welfare Ranching: The Subsidized Destruction of the American West reveals the practices that continue to destroy the ecological fabric of the arid West, where subsidized livestock grazing occurs on nearly 300 million acres of public lands.

The book, slated for publication on Sept. 23, offers a graphic look at the consequences of livestock grazing on public lands, which has turned the West into a giant feedlot for cattle and sheep. Streams are dewatered, soil eroded, habitat ravaged. And the list of endangered species grows and grows.

Welfare Ranching comprises essays from leading environmentalists, scientists, historians and economic experts, including Edward Abbey, Joy Belsky, Carl Bock, John Carter, Thomas Fleischner, Terrence Frest, T H. Watkins and George Wuerthner. The book dispels with hard science and straight economics the popular myths surrounding the Old West that continue to influence the ways of the New West.

The book features more than 150 photographs that serve as testimony to America's ravaged public lands, but that also illustrate the natural values of lands that have been protected or restored.

Welfare Ranching offers plain evidence of a patent truth: Livestock production adversely affects everyone and everything that attempts to walk or merely live in its path: hikers, hunters, anglers, campers, kayakers, birders, mountain bikers, mountain lions, elk, moose, bighorn sheep, bullhead trout, salmon, sage grouse and soil.

Editors Wuerthner and Matteson live with their family in Eugene, Ore. Wuerthner is an ecologist, writer, photographer, wildlands advocate, university instructor and natural history guide. Matteson is a writer, editor and wildlands advocate.

Welfare Ranching is published by the Foundation for Deep Ecology and distributed by Island Press.