I think it works out to closer to 40 people per Texas acre, leaving each individual about 1000 square feet, or a "box" 30 feet to a side. Still impressive. It reinforces how little of the planet is actually suitable for living on, and how much we waste. I think the figure they throw around for the amount of
useful (arable,resource bearing etc) land required to support the average American lifestyle is closer to 24 acres - we're not going to find 960 Texases worth...
People tend to concentrate. Someone who grew up in the central states (or Canada
) might be prone to saying "North America is full of wide open spaces" while someone from the easten seaboard would have a different frame of reference. One thing you always need to keep in mind is that if we are tralking about a US that includes New York and Colorado, we really need to compare to a Europe that stretches from Paris to Siberia, or south to Algeria. There is a
whole lot of open space between England and, say Turkey (currently fighting for inclusion in the EU) but the distance is equivalent to Boston/Miami, a relatively densely poluated part of the world.
Matthias