Word: despoil
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...near Princeton and teaches English at Rutgers, knows his ground. Out of such unpromising material as New Jersey zoning laws and state statutes, he has fashioned a whimsical specimen of an up-and-coming subgenre: the eco-novel. The wealthy residents-Howard's ex-neighbors-want nothing to despoil the green splendor of their homes and three-acre lots. Less favored citizens want Watchung-because it will help to pay property taxes...
...attention-and funding-for railroads, buses and subways. Instead, the House of Representatives has just refused to allow new funds for mass transit. Meanwhile, as fuel supplies dwindle, new appliances are creating absurd demands. Among other concerned legislators, Senator Henry Jackson concludes: "We need to ask whether we must despoil the hills in Appalachia to air-condition sealed-glass towers in New York. We need to ask whether we must put ourselves in hock to Middle East sheikdoms to keep roads clogged with gas-hungry cars." As yet, Americans have not answered, nor even asked, those sensible questions...
...Nonetheless, an unlikely coalition of industrial, political and environmental leaders are all calling for measures to decrease the American appetite for energy. Senator Henry M. Jackson, who this week will introduce an energy-conservation bill in the Senate, puts it this way: "We need to ask whether we must despoil the hills in Appalachia to air-condition sealed-glass towers in New York. We need to ask whether we must put ourselves in hock to Middle Eastern sheikdoms to keep roads clogged with gas-hungry cars...
...vast amounts of shale found in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming could also be important sources of oil, yielding about 25 gallons for every ton excavated. Both shale mining, which leaves great quantities of waste material above the surface, and strip-mining for coal despoil the landscape. But the exploited landscape could satisfactorily be restored-at a price...
...cities today, they realized, men no longer act with even the slightest civility to one another. As men continue to despoil the natural environment, they replace it with a completely despoiled, brusque, quasi-human environment. This is the most criminal aspect of the destruction of the ecology of the planet...