One of the claims sometimes made is that previously industrialized or man made landscapes can not ever be reversed into wilderness. It is claimed that once man touches a landscape, mines, farms, or timbers it surface, it can not ever revert back to a natural status.
The reality is that is far from that.
Man made works, while remarkable, quickly start to fall down and revert back to a more natural status, quickly after abadonmnet. Certainly man is powerful, can move large mounds of earth, and bring materials from far away. Yet, as soon as man walks away, plants start to grow into cracks, water erodes roadways and causes buildings ot fall apart, and animals start to return to recolonize a land once dominated by man.
Fragmentation and private inholdings can make it more challenging for abandoned lands to revert back to wilderness. Any attempt by man to upkeep man’s works, will prolong their existence. Man can fight the natural forces through his active stewartship of his products, and through design, but he can not stop nature’s processes once underway, by simply standing on the sidelines.
Buildings make take decades to fall in and rot away in soil. The lost of old growth timber might take hundreds of years to be replaced. Eroded soils, rock cuts might take thousands if not million years to be disolved back into a truly natural state. Yet, still man’s battle against wilderness is only temporary at best, for once man takes his hand of wilderness, it only starts the long path into wildness once again.
