Few locations on Earth are as haunting or deeply ironic as so-called involuntary parks — places too toxic, dangerous, or otherwise made off-limits for human habitation, but which have paradoxically and unintentionally become sanctuaries for wildlife in our absence.

As the name coined by science fiction author Bruce Sterling suggests, involuntary parks weren’t established for conservation — and in many cases aren’t formally recognized as preserves.

Some encompass former nuclear, military or manufacturing complexes and/or their buffer zones. Some are sites of major environmental disasters, former battlefields laced with unexploded munitions, or slices of no-man’s land demarcating tense borders between geopolitical rivals.

Despite their often destructive origins, a growing number of these involuntary parks have, over time, been officially designated as protected wildlife refuges or cross-border peace parks, actively managed by government organizations and advocated for by citizens and researchers — not so “involuntary” anymore.

It’s an attractive narrative. But without sufficient context, the genesis of an involuntary park (a process also controversially dubbed passive rewilding) can “imply that nature simply fixes itself, or that in the absence of human intervention, a favorable recovery inevitably occurs at sites that may still be seriously degraded or hazardous,” cautions David Havlick, a professor at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs in the U.S. Thus, the violent (and still potentially hazardous) human past may be “greenwashed from view,” he says.

Involuntary Parks Dot the World

Perhaps the single best-known park is the Chornobyl exclusion zone, where large mammals like wolves (Canis lupus) have come to roam following the 1986 nuclear power plant accident. However, the Russian war in Ukraine, which has now touched Chornobyl, points to how “involuntary parks” can be re-impacted by human conflict in new, unsettling ways.

Lesser-known involuntary parks include Zone Rouge, a literal 17,000-hectare (42,000-acre) no-man’s land that was the site of the First World War’s Battle of Verdun, off-limits due to millions of unexploded shells; and Rocky Mountain Arsenal, a once vital weapons plant in the U.S. state of Colorado, declared a toxic Super Fund Site, then morphed into Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge.

Read the full article about involuntary parks by Annelise Giseburt at Mongabay.