Phil, the town's wealthiest man, is a strip miner and environmental polluter whose attitude is that "mountains grow back."

Remember when those strip miners pulled pistols on us back in eastern Kentucky?

Up Coldwater Road from the Maynards, closer to the mining site, Glenn Cornette, a 66-year-old retired strip miner, and his wife, Shirley, 60, feel similarly.

For this sorry state of affairs, he writes, "I blame environmental organizations every bit as much as developers and strip miners."

And: "I blame environmental organizations every bit as much as developers and strip miners" for current failures in wilderness management.

At the same time, the strip miners of the game continue to renew the same few meaningful rivalries every year, and let everybody else fend for himself.

But the strip miners do not suffer the degree of health problems that underground miners do, and their representatives oppose paying for other miners' troubles.

Book One contains stories by a farmer, a farm worker, a farm woman, a deep miner and his wife, a strip miner, and a heavy equipment operator.

During his time in politics, Baxley aggressively prosecuted industrial polluters, strip miners, and corrupt elected officials.

The result has been an undermining of restraints on everything from strip miners to long-haul truckers and corporate executives intent on consumer-unfriendly mergers.