The search for fossil fuels across the American west is turning some of the nation's last open spaces into industrial zones and putting protected areas and wildlife risk. Jim Robbins reports on how the U.S. government is allowing energy companies to carve up treasured landscapes—one well at a time

Beyond the country's national parks is a second tier of wild landscapes that are neither as well known nor as dramatic but are nonetheless beautiful and were also set aside for the enjoyment of the American people. One of them is Largo Canyon, a broad red-and-dun sandstone cleft in the desert outside Farmington, New Mexico.

Several miles off the highway, Largo branches into the smaller Crow Canyon. Centuries ago, the Anasazi and later the Navajo etched into its dark-red walls a series of petroglyphs, including images of men on horseback believed to represent an encounter between Spanish explorers and the Navajo.

Some canyons like this are protected as state or national parks, but this area has instead been turned into a de facto industrial zone. Largo Canyon is studded with dozens of methane gas wells and a network of pipelines, water tanks, and metal sheds. Scars from buried pipelines score the red juniper–studded hills. Each day, hundreds of white pickup trucks roar along the gravel road in clouds of dust, and water tankers lumber by. The occasional hiss of escaping methane gas fills the air, and the towering skeletons of pumps pierce the landscape.

A well, a shed, and other industrial equipment sit at the head of the trail that leads to the pictographs, which are less than a hundred yards away. Gone is the sense of the past that one might have experienced from sitting quietly in front of these drawings. The feeling of what life might have been like here centuries ago is drowned out by twenty-first-century energy production.

"Is nothing sacred?" asks Mike Eisenfeld, an environmentalist with the San Juan Citizens Alliance, as we walk along the sandstone walls and survey the artwork in hundred-degree heat. His organization, based in Durango, Colorado, has been battling the rapid growth in energy development on public lands in the San Juan Basin, a vast geological formation in the Four Corners region, where the borders of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah meet."Everywhere you turn, you see wells. If you don't see them, you hear them. I don't think the American people know what's being done to their land. They wouldn't believe it."

Federal officials see the situation differently. "Every citizen has an interest in natural gas resources," says Tim Spisak, chief of the Fluid Minerals Division for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). "Without these wells, we would need to import more gas from foreign sources." Unlike national parks, which are protected from any exploitation, the public lands in question—the BLM oversees 260 million acres and the Forest Service administers 193 million acres—are designated for multiple uses, including public enjoyment and energy production. Critics charge that exploiting them for fossil fuels prevents them from being used for any other designated purpose, such as wildlife habitat or scenery.