I agree. But. So I think there's an unstated assumption about the driving force behind human population. Asides from a couple of pretty extreme environmentalis

I agree. But. So I think there's an unstated assumption about the driving force behind human population. Asides from a couple of pretty extreme environmentalists, most humans want a world well suited to the life of humans. This means that fundamentally, humans don't care what happens to other life forms. And why not, if everything is doomed to entropy, why would we favour the outcomes of non sentients over us? The issue is, however, humans do not live in an isolated bubble. We are part of the environment, and the environment is a part of us. We need to realise we are symbiotic with the environment, even if specific aren't all that important. As for high population density cities, as others have said, it's the support infrastructure which is killing us. Otherwise, urbanisation alone would have already brought us many gains in terms of pollution. So how does this mesh with still growing? Short answer: policy. Technology alone will not save us. We need a lot of social and cultural changes to also increase the material efficiency of each human. If we want to continue to expand, we need every last drop of ideation, experimentation and ambition. We need an environment for people to thrive, without having a class of people who too busy patting each other on the back, and another too busy surviving to contribute to the greater cause. Edit: I should probably also have mentioned that Technology is getting harder, and we can less and less wait for the magic bullet. We need to act now (on efficiency), so that we have space to invest in the future.