despoil

“We are on the trail of a gang of international thieves who came to France for the purpose of despoiling our museums,” a police spokesman announced.

Picturesque rolling hills, verdant pastures and golden fields of grain provide a deceptively bucolic setting despoiled by greed, treachery and murder.

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.

Today, that environmental perspective, that sense of how we humans continue to despoil our planet in an ever more fossil-fuelized and dangerous fashion, is simply inescapable.

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