Humans have historically always congregated together, but never at the scale of urbanism — if historical precedent is the argument here, we’ve almost always operated at the much lower densities of rural environments.

City urbanism might be the most resource-efficient in many ways, but animal well-being isn’t measured solely in terms of how efficiently we can feed and house you.

If it were, factory farms would be the ideal.

Humans are not humans in cities. “Who survives in NYC without amphetamines”, I remember from a movie when I was a kid. Now I understand the sentence: With no connection to the earth, city dwellers invent an idea of ecology and relation to nature that is in total disconnect with people in farming.

For my goddaughter, killing ants is the top of all evils. Ecology should be able protecting cute things. For me, terraforming kilometers of arable land to build her colonies on Earth, that was the real crime. Cities bring the illusion that humans are legitimate in unfathomable numbers. Cities hide away nature’s constraints.

I think you misunderstood the quote as a kid. People (or at least those without ADD, narcolepsy, etc) are taking amphetamines to compete in a fast-paced city. And besides from my limited personal experience city people may misuse amphetamines at therapeutic doses, but it seems like it’s rural people who abuse them at toxic doses.