As for "natural beauty," nobody wants to live in ugliness. Some of the most beautiful places in California are places where people live. What the morally self-anointed want is to use the power of government to impose their conception of beauty on others, regardless of what the Constitution says about equal rights for all.
Although much is made of the disadvantages of a crowded urban environment, there is much less to that argument than meets the eye. Like everything else in the world, high-density urban environments have costs as well as benefits and different people weigh the two differently.
Urban environments have high density because some people prefer the economic, cultural and other benefits made possible by high density. It has nothing to do with the bogeyman of "overpopulation." American cities were more crowded when the population of the United States was half of what it is today.
Those who don't want to live in cities don't have to -- but that is very different from saying that they should have a right to forever preserve where they live the way that it has been in the past.
People who own a home in a community do not own the community. They paid only for their own property -- and so did those who would sell to a developer. It is amazing how often lofty talk is used to try to deny others the same rights one claims for oneself.
The fact that some people are on the inside looking out does not make them more important than people who are on the outside looking in -- and it certainly does not make their self-interest noble, even if it makes their rationalizations vehement.