pstarr wrote:Specify the ecosystem and the damage level. It depends. On one hand, a strip mined mountain in West Virginia will not heal in a thousand years as not only is the top soil been removed but the underlying rock has been pulverized. But a tall grass prairie? Perhaps a few decades?
What a load of BS. Your statement implies, intentionally or not, that the reshaped West Virginia will be like a desert for many generations before slowly returning to its former condition. Nothing could be much further from the truth. In reality the landscape of West Virginia that has undergone mountain top removal and reshaping is forever changed, but change is not death. It will never again be the virgin forest it was in 6,000 BC when we were at the Holocene Climate Optimum, but that is a far cry from being a lifeless desert or even a thriving robust desert like West Texas. The forest has been removed, the rock was pulverized and processed, the land was reshaped. All of those are true. Once it was reshaped the government required the extraction companies to plant the reshaped land with species that can bind the soil and prevent rapid erosion of the reshaped land. For the most part this is done though with any process you can find violations. However it takes about 20 years for an open field to revert to scrub brush and about 50 for it to revert to early forest when it has been reduced to grassland by any event that removes the wood mass whether that is clearing or severe fire event that kills the soil. So many hypocrites rush to take pictures of mine sites that are either still active or freshly planted with grass species and proclaim they are a restoration failure because there is no longer a lush climax forest growing on that location.
The same processes that have done an excellent job of restoring the forest around Mount St. Helen's in Washington since 1981 are in effect in West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky and Maryland where the mountain top removal has been most practiced. Just because the instant gratification generation sees grass where there was forest they label this a failure instead of understanding that forest ecosystem restore themselves in stages. First is the grassy meadow, then scrub brush from seeds dropped by birds sprout and and grow, then tree seedlings sprout and grow in the shade of the bushes and 100-300 years down the road you have a climax forest right back where there was a forest that was removed by man or nature. The volcanic deposits from Mount St. Helen's were as close to sterile dead as you get in nature but now they are in all stages of recovery to forest. In Yellowstone with the big out of control fires took place in the 1988 some areas the blaze was so intense it literally did sterilize the soil left behind. Is that land sterile today, or covered with seedling forest restoring the land to its former glory?
Nothing ticks me off more than hypocrisy and it doesn't matter if it is a political promise or a so called environmentalist claiming doom. Nature does not do instant gratification when something disrupts the ecosystem, but she is a persistent task mistress and works from start to finish to produce as much biomass in any location as conditions in that location allow.
Nature is about change and balance, not static existence. Ecosystems are continuously shifting as weather, climate, nutrition and events influence that balance. The redwoods of California were not 'always there' though they did exist for a long time on the human scale. During the last ice age nearly all of what was Redwood forest in 1820 was not forest at all. It was too cold or too wet or too dry or any combination of factors. But there are a group of self selected individuals that claim we should ignore the fact that as climate conditions shifted so did the boundaries of the Redwood Forest. What Europeans mapped in the 1820's was not the same redwood forest that existed in 2020 BC because the climate was different then so the range where the forest existed was also different.
But you can bank on this, if you take away the human influence and just observe nature the redwoods will return to whatever range they can live in today, and they will keep existing there into the future so long as those conditions prevail. The exact same phenomenon is in play in Washington where Mount St. Helen's wiped out centuries old climax forest and buried it under hundreds of feet of volcanic fill. It is also fully active in Yellowstone where the fires burned so hot they sterilized the soil of all life, and it is active in the eastern woodlands where small farms are abandoned and returning to forest and it is in effect where 'evil' coal companies blew apart mountains to get out the coal and then reshaped the landscape when they were finished.