A new refrain is playing on the western range.

It resounds across Arizona, where fourth generation rancher John Whitney III and his son, John Whitney IV, allow that public lands ranching makes less and less sense in the drought-worn West. "Ranching on some public lands is just not feasible anymore for a lot of folks," says Whitney IV "It's too complex and inefficient in a time of fierce competition in the industry."

It rings in Utah, where Kash Winn, a public lands rancher in Ferron, says a voluntary grazing buyout program is "the cheapest end to a lot of problems in a lot of cases."

It echoes in Idaho, Colorado and Wyoming, where Max Howrey of Story, Wyo., who bought 500 acres of land in 1958 and never looked back, now looks ahead. What he sees is an eventual end to ranching on public lands. "I can see what's coming down the road , and I feel like it's a good thing to move on ", says Howrey.

And now the song is playing in Washington. In October Reps. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) and Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) introduced legislation to enact a voluntary federal grazing permit buyout program that would generously compensate public lands ranchers in exchange for their federal grazing permits.

The Voluntary Grazing Permit Buyout Act would allow federal public lands ranchers to waive their interest in grazing permits. In exchange, they would receive $ 175 per animal unit month (or AUM, the amount of forage to sustain one cow and calf for one month). The Shays-Grijalva bill authorizes $ 100 million for the pilot program.

The Arizona Voluntary Grazing Permit Buyout Act is a similar bill that applies specifically to Arizona.

"Buying out federal grazing permits is good for western states and the entire nation , says Shays. "It benefits our nation's environment and budget, while providing a lucrative offer to ranchers who want to sell their permits."

"This legislation will go a long way toward resolving the ongoing and contentious debate on public lands grazing in the West," says Grijalva. "Congressman Shays and I have introduced a bill that will give much-needed relief to ranching families suffering the results of drought and other economic factors."

The Whitneys and other public lands ranchers across the West say the time is right. They know the numbers. They see the soil. The average return on investment in public lands ranching is less than 1 percent. Sustaining a cow on Bureau of Land Management lands in the West requires an average of 16 acres a month. Feeding a cow on private lands in the Midwest and East takes an average of 2 acres.

Adding insult to injury, the current federal grazing program costs taxpayers $500 million annually and returns a scant $7 million over the same period.

"It's a relief that Congress is finally seeing past all the theories and paying attention to the reality on the ground," says Whitney III, who holds the largest U.S. Forest Service grazing permit in Arizona. The family's 158,000-acre Sunflower allotment in Tonto National Forest northeast of Phoenix has been closed for three years because of drought.

In a recent poll conducted by the Arizona Grazing Permit Buyout Campaign, 165 permittees (more than 70 percent of all respondents) of the state's 870 federal public lands ranchers supported the bill.

Under the plan, a permittee with 300 cow/calf pairs that graze public lands for five months of the year would receive $262,000. The allotment associated with the grazing permit would then be permanently retired from commercial livestock grazing and the forage reallocated to wildlife.

Ranchers who opt for the buyout could use their compensation to buy more private lands, pay off debts, retire from ranching or leave a monetary gift to their heirs, most of whom don't see ranching in their future.

The retirements would also diminish decades of environmental destruction caused by livestock grazing. In its Global 2000 report, the Council on Environmental Quality noted that "improvident grazing . . . has been the most potent desertification force, in terms of total acreage, within the United States."

No sooner had the Shays-Grijalva bills landed in the U.S. House of Representatives than Rep. Scott McInnis (R-Colo.) sent out flares in the form of a letter to every member of the House, urging them to reject the "radical" buyout proposal. The voluntary buyout campaign, McInnis railed, was the work of "narrow-minded interest groups devoted to nothing less than building a wall between the American people and their federal lands."

When the Whitneys and other ranchers got wind of McInnis' letter, they sent a rejoinder to the congressman. They pointed out that 165 Arizona permittees in support of a buyout "is not a single rancher who may have suffered an unfortunate string of bad years," as McInnis stated.

"This bill was developed by conservation groups and Arizona ranchers working together," the ranchers wrote. "Sure, environmental groups may want to end ranching on federal lands. But that's happening anyway, with or without them. No environmental lawsuit ever bankrupted any ranchers to our knowledge."

Predictably, the National Cattlemen's Association, which relies heavily on memberships, has not endorsed the voluntary grazing buyout. However, various state associations have publicly acknowledged the right of individual ranchers to choose for themselves on the buyout issue.

Supporters of the buyout also note that when the second annual National Conference on Grazing Lands convenes Dec. 7-10 in Nashville, the focus of the meeting will be on "increasing awareness of the economic and environmental benefits" of private not public, grazing lands.

Federal public lands yield only 2 percent of the nation's total livestock feed.

Contrary to the opinion of some western legislators, ranching does not sustain rural communities; rural communities sustain ranching.

"My empirical analysis demonstrates that grazing on federal lands contributes only a tiny sliver of 1 percent of total income and employment, and rarely more than 1 percent," notes Thomas Power, author of "Post-Cowboy Economics: Pay and Prosperity in the New American West." "During the 1990s, local economies in the West grew by this amount every few weeks. The ongoing rapid economic growth has been heavily fueled by families and businesses relocating in the pursuit of higher-quality living environments. Protecting the environmental integrity of public lands contributes to this ongoing economic vitality and almost certainly offsets any losses in the livestock sectors that may be associated with changes in livestock use of federal lands."

Time magazine estimates that 328,000 ranchers and farmers will lose their jobs in this decade alone. And as the cost of ranching continues to rise, the capital value of federal grazing permits continues to decline.

"A federal grazing permit buyout is ecologically imperative, economically rational, fiscally prudent, socially just and politically pragmatic," says Andy Kerr, director of the National Public Lands Grazing Campaign, which conceived the voluntary buyout program. (Western Watersheds Project is one of six conservation groups on the steering committee of the NPLGC.) "It's a win-win-win for permittees, taxpayers and the environment."

"We know this is just the tip of the iceberg," says Whitney IV, steering committee chairman of the Arizona buyout campaign. "A lot of permittees have told us they support a buyout, but they just couldn't believe it would ever happen. Well, now it is happening."

Keith Raether is public information director of WWP and public information coordinator fo rthe NPLGC. He lives in Missoula, Montana.

For more information about the National Public Lands Grazing Campaign, visit www.publiclandsranching.org.