despoil

The naysayers list a cavalcade of complaints against the new Win-River casino complex, saying it would despoil prime farmland, exacerbate traffic, increase police and fire protection costs and threaten native fish in the Sacramento River.

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 19, 2023

There is an economic aspect to the story in that greed is driving developers to despoil these areas because they see profit.

From Salon ● Mar. 2, 2023

The project would despoil a mostly pristine wilderness area.

From Seattle Times ● Dec. 7, 2022

That measure is opposed by members of the local Mura tribe, who say mining would despoil the natural habitat upon which they depend.

From Reuters ● Mar. 23, 2022

Yet we have made the vow; and though no other human generation hath done other than despoil, perhaps we shall be the first.

From "The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume II: The Kingdom on the Waves" by M.T. Anderson

Unfortunately, your visit to Glacier NP was an example of exactly the kind of behavior that despoils and degrades our parks and wildernesses.

From New York Times ● Sep. 20, 2016

There are many benefits of not selling water in disposable bottles in national parks, including reducing trash at parks, carbon emissions and the litter that despoils our parks, landscape and waterways.

From Washington Post ● Jul. 24, 2015

Roger is jealous when Jane flirts with Manishewitz Jr.—“I thought you liked the crabs rangoon here!”—and despoils her new, Roger-free apartment accordingly.

From Slate ● May 14, 2012

Happily, the remedy to his dilemma comes to Nam in a dream: a blue-eyed American sergeant breaks into a bucolic toy community and despoils the place.

From Time Magazine Archive

"Do you call him Nebuchadnezzar?" said Mordaunt, with a terrible smile; "no, it is Charles the First, the king, the good King Charles, who despoils his subjects to enrich himself."

From Twenty Years After by Alexandre Dumas père

Metaphors may have no place at a concentration camp, but it’s hard to look at this beautiful enclosed space and not see it, perversely, as the most despoiled of Edens.

From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 14, 2023

Playing the last days of Romanian communism as frenzied farce, Lucian Pintilie’s “The Oak” is set in a world so despoiled a Hieronymus Bosch landscape might seem bucolic by comparison.

From New York Times ● Apr. 25, 2023

Too much of Seattle has been despoiled by the greed and power of developers.

From Seattle Times ● Feb. 18, 2022

They despoiled the building with their urine and feces.

From Washington Post ● Dec. 16, 2021

Even in Drayton’s time the woods were already very greatly despoiled.

From The Brighton Road The Classic Highway to the South by Charles G. (Charles George) Harper

Miners hauled in hydraulic equipment to dig and dredge and strip the mountains, polluting the runoff so badly that in 1874, the flatlanders who depended on that water went to court to stop the despoiling.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jan. 11, 2025

Plastic, along with other litter, is also despoiling the landscape and polluting our waterways.

From Seattle Times ● Dec. 7, 2023

The world is currently producing about 400 million tonnes of plastic waste every year, with less than 10% of it being recycled, according to the UN Environment Programme, choking landfills and despoiling oceans.

From Reuters ● Nov. 12, 2023

Residents of Papua New Guinea have accused the mining company Rio Tinto of violating their human rights by despoiling the land where they live.

From New York Times ● Dec. 9, 2022

But in the background of all the conversations among the visitors to the island was indignation at the despoiling of the roads they had traveled.

From "Silent Spring" by Rachel Carson