or if we would have a bunch of mouth-breathers demanding their right to spend too much for land tainted with industrial wastes.

Good news! America has plenty of land and water ruined by industrial and agricultural waste that it hasn’t protected. (Also lots that it has, but)

One such case was a lake that suddenly formed in a desert when an irrigation canal overflowed. It has since been fed primarily by runoff from industrial agriculture. It became a resort and tourist destination for a time, until all the birds and fish started dying and rotting on the beaches. We just let it sit there for another fifty years until farming techniques improved to where it was being fed much less, and it started drying out and causing big toxic dust storms. In the last six years or so, more than a hundred years after it formed, there’s a local Indian tribe trying to get a new canal to rehabilitate the wetlands with river water (rather than just more runoff).

It’s called the Salton Sea