It's only ludicrous if you consider doing it with eight billion hunters and gatherers. When you consider a long ago pristine Earth with a much smaller population it was the most natural, sustainable way to live.

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We had a bountiful planet, then came teeming masses of humans, sort of like a plague of locusts, and we poisoned and pillaged the planet. Now we can't even drink water from a seemingly pristine stream, because somewhere upstream there will be cattle shitting in it.