Involuntary park

Drowned cities that cannot be demolished for scrap will vanish wholesale into the unnatural overgrowth.While Sterling's original vision of an involuntary park was of places abandoned due to collapse of economy or rising sea-level, the term has come to be used on any land where human inhabitation or use for one reason or other has been stopped, including military exclusion zones, minefields, and areas considered dangerous due to pollution.

Ghost towns, disused railways, mines, and airfields, or areas experiencing urban decay or deindustrialization may be subject to a resurgence in ecological proliferation as human presence is reduced.

The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone has seen the return of previously extirpated indigenous species such as boars, wolves, and brown bears, as well as a thriving herd of re-introduced Przewalski's horses.

[7] Involuntary parks where human presence is severely limited can host animal species that are otherwise extremely threatened in their range.

In most observed cases, existing involuntary parks are characterized by a restoration of the pre-human ecological order, as opposed to the novel environment theorized by Sterling.