How quickly can an ecosystem be destroyed?
Try six years. Witness neglect and contempt by the Bush regime. The article referenced beneath the fold says more than I can say.
http://select.nytimes.com/...
"In the national forests, big money was not king," wrote Pinchot. The Forest Service was beloved, he said, because "it stood up for the honest small man and fought the predatory big man as no government bureau had done before."
A century later, I drove through the Gifford Pinchot National Forest on my way to climb Mount Hood, and found the place in tatters. Roads are closed, or in disrepair. Trails are washed out. The campgrounds, those that are open, are frayed and unkempt. It looks like the forestry equivalent of a neighborhood crack house.
In the Pinchot woods, you see the George W. Bush public lands legacy. If you want to drill, or cut trees, or open a gas line — the place is yours. Most everything else has been trashed or left to bleed to death.
Oh, if there were a Theodore Roosevelt or a Gifford Pinchot to shake the foundations of our beliefs again!! Bust the trusts, and protect the environment!
I really don't see this in either party's field of candidates.
Is there any candidate, anywhere, who is a trust-buster? It's been a hundred years since Teddy Roosevelt, and his legacy seems to have faded away.
A melancholy song may be appropriate:
Once a piece of wilderness is lost, it is lost forever. The same might be said of our Constitutional safeguards, after too long a time in the hands of criminals and fascists.