Problem is, that wouldn't satisfy the "humans are evil, and the cause of all nature's ills" narrative that underlays much of the activism around climate policy and other environmentalist causes.
The solution always has to be fewer humans and less human activity, with the possible exception of temporary "sorry, we were never here" cleanup efforts.
Would you prefer the "humans are basically good" narrative?
Do you honestly find that to be a better explanation of human history the past few thousand years than "humans are evil, and the cause of all nature's ills"?
Personally, I find the latter proves true to life. Better to accept it and deal with it, than to sweep it under the rug.
That's assuming that all the harm we do, we do it just to do harm. I think this assumption is false. Most of the harm we do is a side effect of things we're trying to achieve.
So, basically, we're just another (slightly smarter) animal.
It's not like, for example, invasive species introduced from another continent stopped for a second and thought: "hey! maybe we shouldn't breed too much and we shouldn't eat all the bees/birds/whatever!".
Life is like a gas, it expands to fill all the space given to it.
I don't think that's inherently bad. After all, life is the exception in the universe. And frankly, most of the universe is boring :)
China did managed population growth, guess what happened, no one is happy. I doubt human can overcome their own nature to step ahead and regulate population effectively.
I am not blaming other countries being irresponsible in controlling population. I was saying simply control population is not as easy a social policy to carry out.
That it isn't human nature that is the problem with population growth, otherwise we wouldn't have large parts of the free world with almost none and even slightly negative growth. The problem is cultural/historical and the problem of chinas one child policy was that it tried to combat the effect while the people still saw having a male heir as important.
Fact: we don't have an issue with positive population growth in most western nations.
Fact 2: the populations of these western nations are human.
Q.E.D.: explosive population growth is not human nature.
It is a cultural, educational, social security and rights issue. The Chinese failed because they tried to fight the result instead of the cause(s).
The tricky thing is separating those people from their support groups long enough for the reasoning to stick. Otherwise, all the effort only gets wasted on trying to overcome people's need of belonging to a group.
The solution always has to be fewer humans and less human activity, with the possible exception of temporary "sorry, we were never here" cleanup efforts.