I've been doing native habitat restoration for twenty years. If you understood how much hands-on work it takes to produce the kind of environment we took from the Indians you would have more appreciation for what people can do to make the wild more beautiful and productive. Lots of people in nature is NECESSARY for it to be productive. "Nature" as you know it, is a creation of a 19-20th Century industrial society completely alienated from the land. It is a myth designed to force people into habitations controllable by an elite, a terribly destructive philosophy for both people and the land.
I hear what you are saying. I am not advocating trying to return to the days the Indians roamed the lands. I do want to avoid getting our population to 600 million and turning the uSA into India. I think we are already on that path and huge populations uually end up with totalitarian states. Hussein has appeared to have blown through our Constitutional protections because the population just listens to TV news propaganda.