I could hear his grin in his voice. "To restore and shore up the topsoil?"
"Yep. To maintain the ecology that maintains man. And besides, woods are pleasant."
"The rivers would be clear. The factories would dump their wastes in the desert. And the sewage would go through processing plants and then be put back on the land."
"Not many factories, anyhow," I said.
"No? Why?"
"Not nearly so many people, for one thing. People would—people did—cherish each other more when they were scarcer. That's a psychological aspect of overpopulation thus far hardly observed. There are so many of us getting in each other's way and making life tough by merely being that we tend to hate each other just from congestion. Then—the people in the better world wouldn't be so crazed over junk. A tenth of the factories we've got now would probably furnish all the junk they'd want."
"Cities, do you think?"
"Maybe a few small ones—where people put in a few years before going back to the open country."
"Villages? Small towns?"