It’s embarrassing for humanity that we cause an almighty ecological disaster and then one of the biggest factors in the recovery of local ecosystems is our absence.
Here's a few randoms to give you a sense:
In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face. - J.C.R. Licklider and R. W. Taylor (1968)
Optimization: Prototype before polishing. Get it working before you optimize it. - Eric S. Raymond, The Art of Unix Programming (2003)
The benefit of using [a formal specification language] is that it teaches you to think rigorously, to think precisely, and the important point is the precise thinking. So what you need to avoid at all costs is any language that's all syntax and no semantics. - Leslie Lamport
The only function of what we do, of art or of anything, is to give voice to the unspoken: to give it a form that it's never been perceived in before. We can't change the evolution of history or gentrification, you can't stop it but at least you can say "look what you're losing". All we can do is give an image to an idea. - Chris Doyle
The most important thing about power is to make sure you don't have to use it. - Edwin Land, founder of Polaroid
Both Ukraine and Russia have plenty of rural landscape. Neither government is trying to shove people into cities against their own will. Occasionally villages try to attract younger people, but those dont really wanna.
(But in both countries, urban people rarely move to villages due to lack of employment opportunities and do move to cities to get jobs.)
You can't put the full measure of ecological complexity into a small cage in a zoo.
We've already had some "rewilding" in Scotland and it was called the Highland Clearances. It resulted in the almost wholesale destruction of Gaelic culture, and most of the region's people losing their homes. Now we have billionaires and aristocrats who want to finish that process.
AFAICT the Highlands (like much of the rest of the unpopulated parts of the UK) aren't wild now, they're a sort of overgrazed brownfield site with damaged drainage patterns that have been reduced to a handful of species.
That isn't propaganda, it's something barely discussed. You've probably never even studied it before and you won't get a rounded view of it off Wikipedia. In fact some of the incidents (which included burning down homes sometimes of elderly people) would have barely gone recorded if it weren't for the Napier Commission which nearly didn't happen. Most of the incidents never did get recorded, because the victims were already in the big cities and other continents.
Now the billionaire Tetrapak heir wants to remove the few remaining people from the Highlands to finish the process. The super rich were always misanthropic and this is just one more example. They can hide their hatred of the common people behind environmentalism all they like. I doubt they care much for nature either. How much pollution has Tetrapak etc produced from its factories? A tonne more than any crofter ever did. But guess who pays? The peasants like they always did.
The Highlands were not just like "the rest of the unpopulated parts of the UK". They were completely different to many of them in multiple ways, even in language. They had been inhabited by people for thousands of years before abusive landlords evicted most of the population. They retained aspects of cultural and social organisation which had disappeared from much of Europe by that time.
This pattern repeats again and again. Most of the Irish were chased off their land by abusive landlords who ground them into poverty and famine. Stalin and other dictators forcibly removed millions of people from their ancestral lands by force and pressure.
An example of rewilding on its wikipedia page is "wildlife-friendly overpasses and underpasses". That's literally going the "making areas more friendly to wildlife" route.
When it comes to 15-minute cities there's all these conspiracies, but then you look behind it and it's just about allowing economic liberty to build taller and allow more commercial uses like doctors, daycares, and corner stores in residential neighborhoods, and restrict free government subsidized street parking.
It's good to be viligant, okay? And if any policies come up that are shoving people into cities, feel free to protest. But until then, a lot of the policies are actually exactly the "being more friendly to wildlife" that you're asking for and not shoving people into cities.
We have the misanthropic billionaire Tetrapak heir buying swathes of countryside in the same region and wanting to kick the remaining people off it.
There are plenty of policies pushing people into cities. It is becoming dearer and dearer to run any kind of vehicle in the countryside here, while there is a near lack of public transport in most places.
The trouble with the fifteen minute city idea is that physical facilities are gone in many cases and replaced by online ones. We don't consider doctors to be "commercial usage" here yet.