public land collecting
I am an earth science teacher and I spend quite a lot of time collecting
samples for my classes. If you are not already aware, this is bill proposed in
Congress that would prohibit all collecting on public lands except to what
amounts to an elite group of academics. This month a new bill is close to
being introduced: Paleontological Resources Preservation Act of 1995. It
would in effect, permit teachers and students and anyone interested in rocks,
fossils and minerals to do surface collecting. The main reasoning is that
weathering and erosion would destroy surface samples anyway, and we all know
how important amateurs are in discovering new samples.
The target date for this legislation is late January 1995, and letters to the
Honorable Larry Craig (R-ID) and Edward Kennedy (D-MA) requesting their support
as Senate Prime Sponsors of the Act are urgently needed from the academic
community.
If you support the new Act, please let your own Senate and House members know.
I know that for myself, my career in geology began as a little kid prospecting
around picking bits and pieces of the past that fueled my curiosity.
Chris