That is pure economics, classic free market stuff. There is no free
lunch, there is no free anything. You have no "right" to destroy or
pollute; the water and land were not in a degraded condition in the first
place, and therefore there is no unfair burden put on someone to clean up
what is, after all, his mess. If it is not his mess, then the market has
not worked very well, and someone else has shoved his costs onto you as
an externality, and the pressure then should be to make everyone shoulder
his or her burden.
The US has been a resource-rich country since inception, and everyone has
treated the costs of development as an externality that will be
shouldered by someone else, out there somewhere. Well, we are that
someone else, and out there is here. I'm telling you that you have not
extinguished my property rights as a member of hte public, and that means
we have two perhaps contradictory property rights. YOurs doesn;t
automatically trump mine.