Urban Abandonment: a Logical Green Future?

Over the long history of humanity, there were many times when great cities and towns were abandoned as great calamities befell them; from Babylon to Troy to the Mayan city of Tikal, for instance.

In modern times, sometimes an urban setting has had to be abandoned for environmental reasons, such as the town of Picher, Oklahoma, which was poisoned by lead mining, and Pripyat in Ukraine, which was abandoned due to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

In some of these cases, at least the floral and faunal wildlife was able to takeover and revivify the town in some manner.

In this scenario depicted below, a mining town in the Carpathian mountains of Eastern Europe is abandoned some time late this century to allow the mountains' wilderness to reform once again...

An abandoned town in the Carpathian Mountains -- some time in the future