It is surely the most egregious and unnecessary form of coal extraction: thousands of acres of land are blown up and bulldozed away, as if the land itself is an unpleasant encumbrance without any value whatsoever.
The most refined modern nations regard the beard as an encumbrance, without beauty or meaning; but the ancients generally cultivated its growth and form with special attention; and that the Greeks were not behind-hand in this, any more than in other arts, is sufficiently shown by the statues of their philosophers.
It can jump off a helicopter and set up in a field mess hall without the encumbrances of amplifiers, microphones and speakers.
It is skimming the most committed families from the public school population, they say, and operating without the encumbrances of a system that receives government funds.
It leverages the Salesforce.com cloud without the encumbrances that come with CRM technology designed for the desktop as opposed to the mobile device.
"In the U.S., I have the freedom to pursue the things that interest me without the encumbrances of fiscal problems in U.K. science--though these do exist in the U.S. now".
Sinking into this feeling, without the encumbrances of my camera or iPhone, I sensed a stillness.
But there is a need for a non-political figurehead at the top of every local council without the partisan encumbrances of say Boris Johnson or his Bullingdon mate David Cameron.
Using the new, lightweight equipment that had come on the market after the war, filmmakers like Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin and Ray Ashley, with their "Little Fugitive" in 1953, found that a new kind of drama could be shot in the actual streets of the city, without the crowd-drawing encumbrances of large Hollywood crews and fleets of location trucks.
He also redistributed the land in the sense that the former hektēmoroi now had control without encumbrance of the land they had previously worked with strings attached.
But Nauru permits its shell banks to operate without such encumbrances.
