The need for travel at the level of contemporary America is an illusion manufactured by the auto companies, for the benefit of the petroleum companies, maintained by a generation of managers so incompetent that the only way they can tell if their employees are productive is to watch them work, and maintained by a government that answers only to corporations and not at all to individual citizens.
Much of your argument hinges on the resources wasted by commuting. I'd say that about 90 percent of the jobs Americans commute to could be done as well or better at home. Most of us spend our entire work day huddled over a computer and talking on the phone after all. I have both of those devices in my home, don't you?
As for the land wasted by suburban or rural homes, that's just because suburban and rural land is cheaper so people can afford to spread out and use more of it per person. Housing outside urban areas could be crammed as tightly as it is inside them if people were motivated to do that, and they could still at least live in smaller cities, making it easier to reach natural areas after work or on weekends, for their natural and documented stress relief.
I suggest the following: Make telecommuting mandatory for any job that can't be demonstrated to require on-site attendance. Let the market dictate the price of real estate, with whatever zoning ordinances and wilderness protection laws you'd like to impose on the nearby greenspaces. You'll achieve a happy medium. You'll find that a huge portion of the damage done to the environment by a prosperous economy is caused by people commuting, not directly by people desperately trying to avoid living in the crowded cities.
It's unclear what the impact on the environment would be if people were free to live in smaller, less crowded cities. But the impact on the people would be positive and enormous. While many people have the constitution to tolerate or even love living in a place like Manhattan, Shanghai, or Nairobi, most people suffer varying degrees of stress in those environments. We are, after all, still Neolithic hunter-gatherers with the instincts to live contentedly in communities of a few hundred souls, since the evolution of civilization occurred much more quickly than our psychologies were able to evolve to adapt to it.
It's a tribute to the adapatility of human nature that we in fact prove able to live contentedly in small cities of around 20,000. In towns that size you find people leaving their doors unlocked, protecting and disciplining each other's children, and helping each other out of jams without the need for government intervention. But any "community" larger than that requires artificial structure and the imposition of laws, as people lose the sense of kinship with one another. Ultimately this results in a Tokyo or a Rio de Janeiro, with various kinds of dysfunction imposed by the oppressive closeness, the artificial order, and the lack of almost any natural surroundings.
When people are stressed by their unnatural environment, they respond by acting a bit crazily. I submit that the damage they do and allow to be done to the planet by not living up to their potential is worse than the incremental damage that would be done by allowing them to live a little further apart from each other and from their own artifacts, and a little closer to the green and brown portions of that planet -- the portions their bodies and minds were designed to interact with.
The lion's share of the damage to the environment is done by transportation, not by the distribution of homes. And that transportation is unnecessary except in the eyes of our president and vice president and the oil barons they are indentured to. Simply doing away with commuting for 90 percent of the population would reduce the average worker's stress level so remarkably that America would find the inner peace to start caring about its land again.
