These might take the form of an inappropriate urban layout and woeful cycling infrastructure, a driving culture that works heavily against those on two wheels, or a dangerously polluted atmosphere.
Today, he says, almost a third of households have little or no access to water: "There are dry sources, or polluted sources".
It was then that I realised that much of what Miller thought, believed and wrote was built on patriotism - the belief in a better America than the country McCarthy had polluted.
The real issue is to ask, why are reefs away from people still perfectly able to recover from cyclones, as they always have, while polluted reefs nearer to the coast are in rapid decline?
They've never been called unclean and sent to huts and baths outside their homes and villages, away from kitchens, in case they turned the bacon rancid, tainted their spouses, repelled fish and game, polluted the air and young hunters, affected the weather negatively with their gaze, bled uncontrollably, stank and became wild and dangerous.
Issues like toxic waste, a second possible nuclear power plant and the famously polluted US "ghost ships" waiting to be dismantled in Hartlepool dock, lurk in the background and worry Mr Allison as well as Respect's John Bloom.
Instead, most of our media landscape is polluted with former military generals and so-called experts, some of them who led the wars in the first place.
In 2008, after mining operations polluted the water supply in San Sebastián, sparking a clean water crisis, then-president Antonio Saca stopped issuing new mining permits.
If on a week day, pedestrians can barely navigate this traffic-congested, hawker-infested, heavily polluted stretch in Mumbai's swank suburb of Bandra, for the last three Sunday mornings these few kilometres of Linking Road have become a road of their own.
Not all India's groundwater is potable anyway; in places, it is getting seriously polluted.
