What changes the equation a little bit though is when we mine or extract resources like fertilizers and oil from below the surface of the planet. That is now adding nutrients and more energy to the system that wasn't around at least in premodern times. All that oil is old biomass anyhow, so burning it and adding it back to the atmosphere would potentially make it available again for species that take advantage of carbon fixation, if we give these species room to accumulate this biomass out of the atmosphere.
It's kind of interesting to think about how even with today's combustion engine tech, we could solve our climate change crises and set the earth to whatever greenhouse gas level we'd like, if we merely strove to balance this system by growing out sufficient biomass.
Abandon the idea of isolated nuclear family living towards more social small communities. Suburban life is terrible for every single happiness metric.
Embrace as much nature as you can. A city park stroll on Sunday ain't enough.
Many jobs still benefit from close proximity to other people and businesses, but cities have no business being 10+ million people and constantly growing, when many of us just spend most of our time behind a laptop screen.
We're at the dawn of an enormous social and civil reorganisation after the massive migration towards cities started in the Industrial Revolution, yet no-one is spending much time thinking about it. The pandemic has massively accelerated the disillusion of city life by knowledge workers, but the only voice we can hear are bosses wanting the return of the status quo, with everybody back in their downtown offices. I would expect more open push-back from us than just grumbling about it on forums.
Maybe it's only me, it feels like it's overdue but we're dragging our collective feet to reimagine better connection between the modern human and our natural roots, especially in the nascent era of climate awareness and loneliness epidemic caused by modern city life.
Why do so many people want to live in the suburbs then? Are they all myopic and stupid?
They want enough space to raise kids. They want a back yard. They want to still be close enough to restaurants and other amenities. They want to be in better school districts. They want to be around less crime.
But no one I know who moved to the burbs is particularly happy about it. They see it as a necessary evil.
The trouble for me personally is that it’s worse on most of the metrics that matters to me.
There are just some things about suburbia that are fundamentally worse and never won’t be. But that involves tradeoffs, and good luck finding or affording a place with a yard in the city. It’s just a bummer that the tradeoffs can be so severe.
At risk of stating the obvious: it depends on what city!
To take it literally, it is impossible for eight billion humans (current world population estimate) to live as migratory hunter-gatherers on earth, even if the planet was terraformed back to how it was ten thousand years ago. It's highly unlikely even eight hundred million people people can live like this. In fact, it's possible there are not enough resources that even eighty million can live like this.
So aside from the terraforming, world population would probably have to shrink to less than 1% of what it is currently.