Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski (pictured) has proposed a bill that would (among other things) set a flat $200 annual fee to permit unlimited shooting by small film crews. Now E&E Daily reports Murkowski's filmmaker nephew faced the fees-and-permits barrier when he wanted to shoot near her father's home, surrounded by the Tongass National Forest.
"A conservation group found 36 U.S. national parks had moderate or worse levels of ozone pollution in a report card released on Tuesday, with four parks in California receiving the worst grades for health effects."
"Conservationists are praising a rare bit of bipartisan cooperation in Congress to fund a program for public areas and historic and wilderness lands."
"Scores of Native American demonstrators protested at the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday against a proposed $6 billion copper mine in Arizona at a site that members of the Apache tribe say is sacred."
"Utah state officials have given the go-ahead for a tar sands mine under construction on the eastern flank of the state. They will, however, require the company to do water and air quality monitoring in a move environmentalists are calling a victory."
"Louisiana is in trouble. The Mississippi River Delta is disappearing into the Gulf of Mexico at the rate of 16 square miles a year, some of the fastest land loss on the planet."
"Below the center of Butte flows water tainted with poisons drawn from a mass of mining and smelting waste that has been a pollution problem for more than a century."
"The Interior Department on Thursday proposed a new rule aimed at protecting streams from the high level of pollution caused by a technique known as mountaintop removal mining."
"The National Park Service thought it had a good strategy for reining in the discarded water bottles that clog the trash cans and waste stream of the national parks: stop selling disposable bottles and let visitors refill reusable ones with public drinking water."
"Kyle Tisdel and Samantha Ruscavage-Barz sift through rocks beside a dusty road in New Mexico's high desert, searching for remnants of life a thousand years past. With the nearest meager town of Cuba an hour away, they're off the beaten path by any standard. But to them, these dirt roads surrounding Chaco Canyon are the front lines of a monumental battle pitting ancient Pueblo culture against the modern world's thirst for oil."
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