You know, not everybody is a pastoralist. One family on a few acres is excessively huge in some parts of the country.
I'm not suggesting that EVERYBODY should live out in the country on several acres, but the sort of huge population scenarios that many people promote as perfectly fine involve NOBODY living that way, and nobody ever having visited such a home or known anyone who grew up in or lived in such a home. I don't think they're appreciating the mindset shift that would accompany that.
In one of the books about the Wall Street excesses of the 1980s with the downfall of Michael Milken and others who were banned from the securities industry (and in many cases served prison time), there's a little anecdote about one of these guys who moves with his family to another state, to a house in the suburbs. His young son, about 5 or 6, is confused as they approach and enter their new front door: "Where's the doorman?", he asked. This child had not only never lived in a place where people open the front door of the building they live in all by themselves, but he'd never known anyone who did since all his and his parents' friends lived in "doorman buildings", and he had no idea that such a thing was possible. At least with current population levels, he was bound to make this discovery sooner or later, but I'd hate to see our country become the sort of place where most children would never become aware of such lifestyles.