INEDALE, Wyo. -- Linda Baker likes to say that when she settled in this isolated corner of Wyoming 23 years ago, "it was the least populated valley in the least populated state in the Lower 48."

But Pinedale, the Sublette County seat, is no longer isolated and no longer as quiet as when Baker arrived. The town lies on the edge of one of the most productive natural gas reservoirs in the United States, a vast bubble of fossil energy trapped beneath the gently rolling hills just outside of town. That gas field is the focus of an energy boom that has ignited fierce debate in Wyoming over the proper balance between resource extraction and environmental protection, and has transformed the landscape, economy and culture of Sublette County by boosting its population, property values and crime rate.

"I feel like I'm being robbed of my home," Baker said. "My town is full of strangers."

Pinedale is not alone. The energy boom transforming Baker's home echoes across the American West, where skyrocketing gas prices and relaxed government regulations have unleashed one of the biggest natural resource bonanzas of the past century. Those echoes rebound also to the coast of Ventura County, where proposals to build liquefied natural gas terminals have ignited a high-decibel debate over public safety, environmental quality, national security, and the balance of power between state and federal governments.

Although the rush to drill and the push for ports seem at first glance to have little in common, the two phenomena are linked by a common thread: Both are symptoms of America's ever-growing hunger for energy, and its diminishing ability to satisfy that hunger by tapping its own resources. To understand why Ventura County could find itself one day greeting a parade of LNG tankers off its scenic shoreline, a good place to start is in western Wyoming. There, as in dozens of other places in the rural West, the nation's past and future are colliding in the sagebrush.

Battling a juggernaut

Baker runs the Upper Green River Valley Coalition out of a small office on the second floor of the Stockman's Building, which has a bar, restaurant and drive-through liquor store on the ground floor. From a window seat in the restaurant, patrons can watch a steady parade of pickup trucks and big rigs growling through town on Pinedale's main street.

The unmarked pickups with dogs and neat silver toolboxes in the back belong to ranchers. Those with logos on the doors and heaps of hoses, tanks and other equipment in the back belong to gas companies or wellfield-service businesses. All are equally coated with grime from the dusty, unpaved roads that crisscross the countryside.

By the standards of suburban Southern California, Pinedale is still a pretty quiet place. The town of about 1,600 people lies in the heart of the Upper Green River Valley, a 7-million-acre swath of rolling rangeland watered by the Green River and cupped by the Wyoming, Gros Ventre and Wind River mountains. Together, the three ranges form a craggy, snowcapped U, with the open end pointing south. In that direction, the landscape tapers away into the scrubby badlands of southwestern Wyoming, where cows outnumber people and pronghorn antelope outnumber cows.

Baker has the slender and wiry build of someone who would look equally at home rowing a raft or climbing a slab of granite. One of Pinedale's attractions is the many outdoor activities made possible by the rivers and mountains in its scenic neighborhood. Recreation long ago supplanted ranching as a major driver of Sublette County's economy, and it's what drew Baker to the area.

In recent years, however, ranching and recreation have been overshadowed by drilling and pumping. Baker has worked at various times as a member of a seismic survey crew, trail mapper for the U.S. Forest Service, teacher and part-time librarian, but for the past two years she has been a paid activist trying to influence the course of a fossil-fuel juggernaut.

Pumping profits

Baker's battle began in 1994, when gas companies applied for permits to drill the first 40 wells in the Jonah gas field, 35 miles southwest of Pinedale. Baker tried to stall the project because of its likely effect on wildlife but was brushed aside like a tumbleweed in the path of a locomotive. There are now more than 600 wells in the Jonah field, with an additional 3,100 proposed. At a second field near town, about 600 wells have been punched into the dry slopes of what geologists refer to as the Pinedale anticline.

The wells in both fields are on public property managed by the Bureau of Land Management, which leases it to energy companies and processes drilling permit applications. Geologists estimate there's 7 trillion to 10 trillion cubic feet of gas in the Jonah field and perhaps twice that in the anticline. Altogether, that's about 18 months' supply for the entire country at current consumption rates. The Pinedale-area wells are expected to operate for up to 40 years.

The gas in the Upper Green represents a lot of money -- not just profits for energy companies, but income for field workers and revenues for state and local government, which tax gas company property and share in the royalties on production.

In 2003, the most recent year for which complete statistics are available, the taxable value of natural gas production in Sublette County was $1.8 billion, according to the Wyoming Department of Revenue. That was tops in the state and more than double the value a year earlier, when Sublette County produced $700 million worth of natural gas. Property tax collected in Sublette County last year jumped 116 percent over the year before, driven mainly by the rise in the value of gas company holdings, according to the Department of Revenue.

The high prices and high profits are, paradoxically, evidence of a looming threat over the domestic gas industry. Despite the boom in Sublette County and scores of other places in the West, gas production in the United States is falling steadily further behind demand. That growing gap is pushing consumer prices to record highs, and it helps explain why energy companies are suddenly interested in building liquefied natural gas ports along the nation's coastline.

But in Pinedale, the threat isn't evident -- yet. Although barely visible from town, the wells tapping the huge gas fields outside Pinedale have turned what was once empty rangeland into an industrial zone.

Huge trucks roar along the web of dirt roads crisscrossing the hills, sending up roostertails of dust that hang in the still air. Drilling rigs tower against the skyline. Pickups full of field workers speed along the roads, which have been widened and bladed flat to accommodate the trucks hauling drilling mud, water and other materials to and from the wells.

Each of the well pads encompasses one or more wells topped by a tangle of pipes and valves. Each also has a large pit full of toxic wastewater and drilling muds, and a collection of pipes, dehydrators and collection tanks for the volatile liquids that emerge from the well with the gas. The pads themselves, up to 5 acres in size, are flat, barren expanses of gravel. Each has a flare tower used to burn off some of the unwanted gases that vaporize from the condensate.

The plumes of smoke and other emissions from the fields worry some local residents, who've watched haze smudge their views of the mountains and the stars.

Perry Walker is among those alarmed by the effect of energy production on air quality in the Upper Green. A slender man, pale and with sharp-edged features, he lives on a hillside north of Daniel in a mobile home that's full of cats and memorabilia from his 25-year career in the U.S. Air Force.

He's a physicist and nuclear engineer who worked on a variety of projects for the Air Force, including testing infrared detection technology used to develop anti-aircraft missiles. An avid amateur astronomer who built his first telescope when he was 14, he now has a small observatory in his backyard, covered with a 10-foot aluminum dome.

Altering the view

The first indication that energy development was changing his home came when the floodlit well fields began to interfere with his stargazing.

"When I came here in 1990-91, I liked to look at a particular galaxy," he said. "Along about 1998, I started to notice it wasn't what I had been seeing ... my night sky was not so black."

Five years later, he began to notice his daytime view of the mountains was being obscured by haze. He began writing letters to state and federal air quality regulators, suggesting gas exploration and production was degrading air quality in the Upper Green River Valley, and asking the agencies to monitor drilling activity to see if that was the case.

When government agencies ignored him, Walker decided to gather the data himself. He spent $4,500 on a high-resolution spectrometer, fabricated a collection device, and hooked the system to a computer. He then began analyzing the plumes released by gas well flares. According to the spectrometer, the smoke contains a witches' brew of toxic metals and other chemicals, including sodium, potassium and lithium, as well as run-of-the-mill air pollutants such as sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and soot.

"I'm getting broken-hearted by what's happening to this area," Walker said. "People don't understand the pressures of the outside world that are bearing down on Wyoming. They think they can hunker down and just wait it out."

Exporting the impact

There's a certain irony in the way gas production is affecting the air in this remote part of Wyoming, although Pinedale-area residents don't seem aware of it. Or if they are, they're too polite to mention it to visitors from the West Coast.

California is the second-largest consumer of natural gas among the 50 states, trailing only Texas. If it were a country, it would rank as the 10th-largest user of natural gas worldwide. This is not just because California has a large population but because its strict air quality regulations have made low-polluting gas the fuel of choice for electricity generation.

Californians burn nearly as much gas to produce electricity as they do to heat their water, warm their homes and cook their food. They generate a greater share of their electric power from gas -- 42 percent, according to the California Energy Commission -- than the residents of any other state. Since 1998, 27 gas-fired generating stations have come on line in California, and 11 more are under construction, according to the California Energy Commission.

Yet California produces only 15 percent of the gas it consumes. The rest is imported by pipeline from Canada, Wyoming and other states in the interior West, where the gas wells feeding California consumers contribute to local air pollution like that documented by Walker. In a sense, Californians have exported some of the air quality problems associated with their "clean" electricity generation to places such as the Upper Green River Valley.

The effects of gas production on wildlife represent another potential environmental impact exported to Wyoming by distant consumers.

Pinedale lies in the middle of one of the richest concentrations of big animals in North America, an estimated 100,000 mule deer, pronghorn antelope, bighorn sheep, moose and elk. The animals migrate between their winter range, typically along the rivers and on protected slopes, and their summer range in the mountains. Some pronghorns travel from southern Wyoming to the Grand Tetons and back each year, a 320-mile round trip that's one of the longest mammalian migrations in the world.

"What we've got here are two world-class resources -- wildlife and natural gas -- in one place," Baker said.

Because of the topography of the Upper Green, the animals are funneled into a bottleneck northwest of town where the hills and the rivers pinch the migration corridor to only a couple of miles in width. Named Trapper's Point, the bottleneck is the site of old Native American hunting camps, testament to the animals' vulnerability there. Already constrained by geography, the bottleneck has been fragmented and narrowed even further by private homes, fences and roads.

Environmentalists warn that expanded drilling -- which is sought by energy companies hoping to pull even more gas from the productive Pinedale fields -- threatens to plug the bottleneck completely, with devastating effects on the migrating herds.

"This is nationally significant public land," said Peter Aengst, who coordinates The Wilderness Society's energy campaign out of an office in Bozeman, Mont. "There's already been a tremendous impact on wildlife."

The BLM's Pinedale office is at the center of the storm swirling around energy development in the Upper Green, a storm that has come to represent the broader controversy over energy exploration in environmentally sensitive areas throughout the West. And Prill Mecham, the BLM's Pinedale field manager, is at the eye of that storm.

Mecham is of middle age, with graying strands of hair and an easy smile, and looks like she ought to be just about anywhere but the heart of a nationwide political struggle. She certainly wasn't anticipating that role when she came to the Pinedale office from Carson, Nev., expecting a sleepy, out-of-the-way posting. Instead, she arrived just in time to have one of the greatest energy booms of the past century drop into her lap.

"The day after I got here was the day they signed the Jonah II EIS," she said, referring to the environmental study on what would turn out to be a hugely productive gas field. "When I first got here seven years ago, we had 12 (drilling) rigs operating in the entire field office. This past summer, we had 40." To cope with the boom and process drilling applications, the Pinedale office staff has nearly doubled in that time, from 26 full-time employees to 50.

Across the West, BLM offices in gas-rich areas have endured a similar crush. So many bureau employees are processing drilling applications that it has compromised the agency's ability to protect the environment from the effects of exploration and production, according to a June report by the Government Accountability Office.

Before the BLM leases land to drilling companies, the agency applies stipulations to it, such as prohibiting winter activity, requiring setbacks from waterways or imposing buffer zones to separate wells from residential subdivisions. The BLM does not, however, impose air- or water-quality regulations on the leaseholders.

Environmentalists are critical of this, but Mecham says the BLM is not a regulatory agency; it's a land manager, and therefore lacks the authority to impose such regulations, which instead lie with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Wyoming's Department of Environmental Quality.

"I think the most important thing we can do when we're involved in change like this is to keep the lines of communication open and really listen to people," Mecham said.

Losing a way of life

Concerns about the effect of the gas boom on Pinedale and the other small towns of Sublette County are not restricted to paid activists and inquisitive retirees. Ranching has long been the economic and cultural glue holding the Upper Green River Valley communities together. And like their counterparts across the West, many ranchers in Sublette County view the gas juggernaut with alarm.

Freddie Botur is one of them. A tall, rail-thin man in his early 30s, he runs his family's Cottonwood Ranch south of Daniel. It's an 80,000-acre spread, of which the family owns 12,000 acres; the rest is leased from the BLM.

To reach the home where he and his wife, Amanda, spend the summers, visitors must follow an unpaved county road about 12 miles into the rolling sagebrush prairie, toward the snowcapped bulk of the Wyoming Range, and then turn onto a rough dirt driveway. Three more miles of bumpy track lead over a ridge with a spectacular view and descend into the small valley of Cottonwood Creek.

Between the creek and a low, sheltering bluff stands a collection of old wooden structures -- a barn, a chicken coop and several outbuildings -- which Botur, a former contractor, is restoring. A corral holds a few horses. A pack of mismatched dogs comes barreling across the yard to greet visitors. It includes a few shepherds and a poodle, a breed seldom found on working cattle ranches. The centerpiece of the complex is a century-old homesteader cabin of hand-hewn timbers, where the Boturs live during the brief interludes between Wyoming winters.

Botur said he doesn't oppose all energy development -- there are, in fact, several gas wells on his ranch -- acknowledging that it meets a demand. But there are appropriate and inappropriate places to drill, he said, as well as better and worse ways to go about it. If spaced too densely, gas wells can render grazing land unusable; improper discharge of the chemical-laden water that often emerges with the gas can kill grass and contaminate streams and stock ponds.

What most concerns Botur, however, is the way the energy boom threatens to change the character of rural Wyoming. As the population grows, drawn by gas jobs and gas money, it puts pressure on ranchers to subdivide and cash in on their holdings. As the range is carved into ranchettes, the old ways disappear and traditional community bonds dissolve.

"A big part of this oil and gas invasion is that a lot of that culture is threatened," Botur said.

Like Baker and many residents in communities that are trying to balance the costs and benefits of energy development, Botur wants stringent environmental regulations imposed on gas operations. He argues that the extraordinary nature of the prairie wilderness -- a landscape of wild, open space that once defined the American frontier and continues to exert a powerful hold on the nation's image of itself -- deserves extraordinary protection.

"What we do here is deciding the fate of the West," he said.

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