With the world's population now exceeding 8 billion, we need to be thoughtful about the best way to rewild ourselves. We can live in dense cities with concrete high-rises but animals can't. Many animals at the top of the food chain need significant ranges for themselves. So the challenge is finding a way that we can minimize our footprint while also providing more opportunities for legitimate connection with nature. Put another way, a bimodal life - with time split between a concrete high-rises and natural areas is probably more ideal for the overall system than a push for everyone to live in slightly more rural areas.
The world is far bigger than most realize. Split completely equally there's enough room for more than 200,000 square feet per person. [1] Thats about 4 football fields of area for every single man, woman, and child alive today.
Factor in that some people enjoy living in urban areas, most won't leave in any case, and so on - and we're realistically talking about tens to hundreds of football fields per person. It's a big world out there.
Although that is true, the counterpoint is that I think some people underestimate the potential impact on animals and how much room away from humans they really need. Some interesting recent research here: https://www.ualberta.ca/en/folio/2025/01/human-recreation-pu...
only about 71% of all land is habitable, and there would be a lot of other restrictions in terms of access to resources, and we need land dedicated to stuff like manufacturing and shared common spaces, so that per-person number quickly gets much smaller
