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With rangelands being one of the greatest sources for novel scales of energy development, it is clear that actions are needed to understand how energy development boosts or degrades various economic, cultural and ecological services in these regions. We discuss the disciplinary shift needed from the modern rangeland professional to understand the impacts of energy development in rangelands. This requires moving past traditional utilitarian approaches associated with a solitary ecosystem service, such as livestock production or harvest, and toward an approach that embraces energy development as one of multiple ecosystem services that can be derived from rangeland landscapes. Sustaining multiple services, however, requires management that can effectively assess the tradeoffs of energy on food, fiber, water, disaster avoidance, and biodiversity within a dynamic framework built around concepts of complex adaptive systems. We present the trade-offs in ecosystem services associated with oil and gas development across the Great Plains. We highlight the loss of net primary productivity (NPP), land area, and water resulting from increased infrastructure and resource extraction. From 2000 to 2012, approximately 12 teragrams of dry biomass have been lost to oil and gas. Three million hectares have been converted to well pads, roads, and storage facilities. Hydraulic fracturing has consumed an estimated 7,187 to 33,903 million cubic meters of water. As energy growth continues, rangelands will be faced with the cumulative impacts of oil and gas development and be forced to abandon long held paradigms in both agriculture and conservation for energy exploitation. It is imperative that rangeland ecologists, managers, and policy-makers understand the ecological consequences of the modern energy boom, and the many trade-offs among economic benefits, ecosystem services, and overall human well-being that we now face.