The rush to develop our public lands began in 2001 with an executive order to federal agencies from President Bush "to expedite energy-related projects." In 2005, Congress, trying to find a way to reduce American dependence on foreign oil, passed the sweeping Energy Policy Act, which among other things streamlined the process for energy exploration and development on public lands. The result has been a scramble by private companies to search for and produce oil, gas, uranium, geothermal energy, and coal on public lands across much of the Rocky Mountain West. Randy Udall, director of the Colorado-based Community Office for Resource Efficiency, calls it "one of the great land rushes in American history." Other opponents say that the mushrooming development is a desperate attempt by a society so dependent on oil and gas that it will do anything to feed its addiction—including destroy publicly owned jewels. A 2007 study by the nonprofit Environmental Working Group found that the number of wells drilled on wildlife habitat on public land in Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming has doubled under the Bush administration, from just over 1,000 a year in 2001 to more than 2,000 today.

Local support is driven by the fact that the boom has been good for business. "It's been phenomenal for the area," says Tony Atkinson, chairman of the San Juan County Commission. "There's a lot of new housing, a lot of young families, more retail, more name-brand stores. Gee, we've got two Wal-Marts now."

But the environmental impact on the West is growing so rapidly and spreading to so many places that it's difficult to track. "The scope, the scale, and the disregard for any other resources are unprecedented," says Gloria Flora, a former Forest Service supervisor, who made headlines in the 1990s when she declared a moratorium on development on a wide swath of the Rocky Mountains.

The boom is also affecting tourism. In Pinedale, Wyoming, for instance, air and water pollution have become serious problems, according to Mindi Crabb, director of marketing for the county tourist office. "It's the long term that I'm worried about," she says. "They want to punch wells in the Wyoming Range. If they trash the national forest, our visitors will have no place to go and we'll have nothing to fall back on. Tourism was the biggest part of our economy before energy development."

In 2005, the National Trust for Historic Preservation placed the entire National Landscape Conservation System (NLCS), which is managed by the BLM, on its list of 11 most endangered sites, in large part because of energy development. The NLCS covers about 26 million acres of BLM land throughout the West and includes national monuments, conservation areas, and historic and scenic trails. Former Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt and the actor Edward Norton recently formed a nonprofit called the National Conservation System Foundation to organize local groups to protect the NLCS from energy development, urban sprawl, and other threats.