despoiled

Maybe it’s Mother Earth, which the Tsalal scientists eagerly despoiled by urging the mine to increase its poisonous waste output to soften the permafrost and enable them to extract the microorganisms they source with less damage and faster.

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.

“Postcard From Earth” steeps you in a very loose 50-minute tale about life rising from the oceans onto the land, the birth of human civilizations and the moment, not so deep in the future, when humanity departs a despoiled Earth to settle other worlds — in the process recalling our home planet’s magnificence.

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.