Last week in Washington, D.C., a federal judge heard arguments in a lawsuit by a Louisiana man against the federal government that bars him from using property he bought nearly four decades earlier. Sidney Longwell of Baton Rouge was too ill to travel; sitting in for him with his Mountain States Legal Foundation attorney were his daughter Kelly and friend Sonny Cranch, members of his tiny company, Solenex, LLC. Senior Judge Richard J. Leon presided over the hour-long proceeding and conceded its importance. “No matter how I rule,” noting trials will delay his opinion until summer, “this is going to the Supreme Court.”

In 1982, the Bureau of Land Management issued Longwell a 6,247-acre oil and gas lease in the Badger-Two Medicine Area of the Lewis and Clark National Forest—south of Glacier National Park, the Great Northern Railroad, and U.S. Highway 2, east of private lands, and southwest of the Blackfeet Reservation in Glacier County in northwestern Montana. In 1983, an application for permit to drill was submitted for one well to evaluate the potential of that part of the Overthrust Belt, whose unique geology may yield “100 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.” After four National Environmental Policy Act and National Historic Preservation Act reviews, which found no “cultural resources” or “religious site or activities,” the APD was approved in 1985, 1987, 1991, and finally in 1993—subject to onerous mitigation measures. New reviews are required if producible quantities of energy are found by drilling.