So true. The option for on ordinary family to live comfortably on a few acres in an outer suburban or rural area is gradually vanishing. People who keep putting forward silly calculations of how many acres there are in the US and how we could easily fit a hundreds of millions more in, scare me. Not only do these scenarios leave out massive chunks of reality, but they also seem to imply that rapid population growth can go on forever with no harm to quality of life. As if "proving" that the US could hold a billion people all living in nuclear families on one acre plots, means that that would still be true 2 generations later, after the population had quadrupled due to people having an average of 4 children apiece.
I'm not eager to have my grandchildren and great-grandchildren grow up in a country where experiencing time alone with nature, looking out on hundreds of acres of undeveloped, unpopulated land, is no more possible than seeing a flock of passenger pigeons. We're going to have to stop, so we might as well stop now, while there really is enough for everybody. And we need to get the third world to stop too, because they'll just keep swarming over our borders in ever larger numbers as they keep making more and more of themselves.
It never seems to occur to the more-babies-are-always-better crowd that crowding equals socialism. People lose their sense of self and of family unit, as they are constantly surrounded by and superficially interacting with huge numbers of people, including many they don't know at all. They come to believe that everybody's problems are their own, and that their own problems are everybody else's, because the the dividing line between self and others is pressed out of existence.
With growth of population, comes also greater government interference in our lives.
You know, not everybody is a pastoralist. One family on a few acres is excessively huge in some parts of the country.