How so? Concentrated populations means you have to produce (energy, food etc.) far away from where it's consumed. So you need to extract and produce on a big scale so that model becomes sustainable (if it ever is, which i doubt).
When the concentration is smaller, you can live in harmony with your local environment: produce your food, your energy, your clothes and houses with what's around you, which will always be better for the environment than shipping "eco-friendly" materials across three continents before reaching your supermarket aisle.
Production should be as close as possible to consumption. Concentrating populations means you can't locally produce electricity (because you need so much of it, it's dangerous to produce so you put it away from urban centers) or food (because you need so much of it, and the surrounding land is used for "urban development" and other sweet words for gentrification and privatization of space).
So i used to think some smarter industry regulations and government policy could fix the environment. Then i realized our entire civilization is based on fucking things up and exploiting other people, and those holding the reigns will not stop their bloody mess until they're made the planet uninhabitable. It speaks for itself that billionaires invest their fortunes in traveling to Mars.
We already produce enough food and have enough housing for everyone on this planet. On a global scale, a third of the food produced is thrown away. This reaches almost 50% in industrialized societies like Europe/US. Yet many people struggle to fill their fridge. Here in France (official stats by INSEE) 3 million houses are EMPTY (not secondary houses, UNUSED houses) yet 150 000 people sleep on the streets.
The same goes with the environmental crisis. It's not a crisis because we don't know what to do. It's a crisis because we know what to do to save the planet and it goes directly against our way of life as consumers, and against the interests of our ruling classes and industrial elites.
