When I saw the recent trailer of the new movie, which I liked, I was disappointed with the shot of San Francisco bay. With the memo you have quoted above it makes me wonder even more, if Abram's repeated claim of understanding Star Trek's core values is anything more than a sound bite.
While it
does appear to be true that Earth has, by and large, been returned to its natural state, from what we saw on Voyager, and at the beginning of ST:V, and other places, that doesn't mean that humanity has
abandoned Earth. In fact, I would assume that the presence humanity still has on Earth
would be packed into the smallest areas possible - highrise cities, probably even more highrise than is possible now, utilizing anti-grav, force-fields, replicators, materials/polution/waste control, and future materials technologies. (We
won't go fully underground, much. Most of us don't really like it.)
If one assumes that mankind has pulled back to 20 or so megacities at places like San Franscisco, Leningrad, Paris, Sydney, and so forth, even if each of those cities held 100 million people, that's still "only" about 2 billion people - only about a third of what we have now. Add maybe another few million living in small naturalist villages or maintaining tiny outposts of civilization (and providing clean-up) near things people would still want to visit, like beaches or the Grand Canyon, and you've still gone a long way toward putting the planet back to pristine.
