Don’t disagree. Merely pointing out that much of the perception of population density is because those who decry it choose to hang out where everybody else chooses to hang out.
A great deal of the country is less densely populated than 50 or 100 years ago. I have backpacked through areas of Utah and Colorado where miner’s and homesteader’s abandoned cabins are common. Nobody lives there anymore. Same for the Ozarks of MO and AR, only more so.
My parents both grew up in Kansas. Their hometowns are today more or less ghost towns. Nobody wants to live there anymore.
The country has become at the same time both more densely populated and the population more concentrated than it used to be.
Overpopulation is not really about empty space versus open spaces, there will always be vast open spaces, even if we have 50 billion people in the world.
Using very rough, very general numbers, we can say that the American population stabilized at about 200 million in 1970 or so, the 1965 Immigration Act destroyed that stability that our native population had reached.
To me 150, or even 200 million people was all that we ever needed, yet with all those people we still could maintain a high quality of life in our cities and in the resources close to our cities, back then we did not have to travel for hours to reach the outdoor activities. As I said earlier, even in big cities we knew each other, didn’t need keys and locks and our communities were manageable, today most Americans lives more resemble organized farm production type lives.
In 1970 I thought that we were headed to be something like I imagine Switzerland is, a clean, peaceful combination of city and country, a population that is calm, united, that rather than being forced to constantly focus on survival and keeping the machine from collapsing, that we would actually become more advanced and futuristic, and advanced. I saw more refinement of our urban public space, urban forests, the conquest of outer space and the oceans, not that we would be crushed as bureaucrats struggled to manage an ever growing mass of humanity and the paving over of massive regions to accommodate them, and the necessity of the state having to takeover regional resources to deal with the water and sewage needs of the people farms to keep production humming and riots from breaking out.
There will always be enough land, food and water, but that doesn’t mean that there are not too many people.