There's quite a lot of studies on this that indicate the opposite:

"It has been shown that cities of a high density, such as, for example Hong Kong, have a far lower transport energy demand per capita than low density cities such as Houston, by a factor of 18. On average, when comparing 10 major cities in the US with 12 European cities, European cities are five times as dense but the US cities consume 3.6 times as much transport energy per capita. The conclusion often drawn from such data is that dense cities are low energy cities." [1]

You are correct that there is more immediate impact to the environment from dense urban areas, but it's outweighed by the gains in energy savings from sharing resources (energy, transportation) effectively. This is why contemporary urban planning tends to push compact, dense neighbourhoods over suburban sprawl.

[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378778802...

I think you completely misunderstood me.

Let's compare the following two scenarios:

- 10,000 people live in log cabins in 1,000,000 acres.

- 10,000 people live in 100 acres.

Let's suppose the people living in log cabins use a hundred times as much energy as the second group.

Clearly from an energy standpoint, that isn't good. But the second group has completely and utterly decimated 100 acres, while the first has minimal impact on the land.

Basically, in summary, even if consumption goes up as we spread out, the amount of impact experienced by a given area of land decreases as our impact is diluted over a larger area.

Phrased differently, it's easier for native organisms to survive if humans are spread out, than if we bulldoze their habitat and build highrises.

10'000 people living in 10'000 log cabins, each of 50m² (5 × 10 m² sounds reasonable to me) will cover more space than 10'000 people living on 100 acres (= 0.4km²). Furthermore, if you consider a single spot of 0.4km² populated in an area of 4047km², you will likely find that its impact on the vast majority of those 4047km² is absolutely minimal, whereas, if my WolframAlpha-foo is not completely wrong, there is no point further than 400m from the next human settlement in your first scenario.

This is a false dichotomy; in reality, impact on the natural landscape does not decline with housing density.

Suburbs are not little log cabins surrounded by wilderness. They are big houses with big yards, garages, roads, schools, shopping malls, parking lots, etc. At even lower densities, in many rural areas houses are surrounded by farmland, which is also a substantial alteration of the natural landscape.

In addition, energy has to come from somewhere, and energy development also impacts the land through mining, drilling, refining, transporting, and using the energy sources. Even solar and wind have impacts on land use and must scale with demand. So it's incorrect to disregard energy use, because it will impact the land somewhere.

> Phrased differently, it's easier for native organisms to survive if humans are spread out, than if we bulldoze their habitat and build highrises.

This is just 100% wrong. The habitat gets bulldozed (or plowed under) in any case when humans move in and start developing.

9 feet for one lane road between 10,000 cabins in a line 209 feet apart leads to 431 acres of road area. i.e. your less dense population already destroys more road area than the denser city did. It is an unfortunate reality that dense cities are orders more efficient for a modern society than spread out ones.

Phrased differently, if we have to bulldoze anyway, we should bulldoze the minimal surface area.

Let me know if messed up the calculation, I never used acres or feet.

The second scenario leave 999,900 acres completely untouched while the first scenario probably impacts at least 5,000 acres.