I think usually the unsustainability argument is about scaling it to the population of the world. Our modern and in many ways awful systems of mass food, energy, and water production are just vastly more efficient per capita of resource requirements than individuals could ever hope to be "living off the land". Even if their footprint's a bit lower, it's only a solution for the relatively-elite of the planet, and they're actually being more wasteful than others of net resources in some senses.
Just doing the quick ugly napkin math for rough validation, Wikipedia says the world has roughly 14,000,000 km² of "arable land". If you convert that to acres and divide by the current global population, that's a little under half an acre per human. If the average family grouping were of size 4, that's only 2 acres of supposedly-arable land somewhere in the world per family. That's skipping over a whole lot of details and side-points, but still, it doesn't seem like this is a sustainable path for the whole planet to go down.
Just doing the quick ugly napkin math for rough validation, Wikipedia says the world has roughly 14,000,000 km² of "arable land". If you convert that to acres and divide by the current global population, that's a little under half an acre per human. If the average family grouping were of size 4, that's only 2 acres of supposedly-arable land somewhere in the world per family. That's skipping over a whole lot of details and side-points, but still, it doesn't seem like this is a sustainable path for the whole planet to go down.
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