Part 4, Chapter 11 Summary and Analysis

"The Lonely War of a Good Angry Man" portrays Harry Monroe Caudill's crusade against the devastation of eastern Kentucky by strip mining. Caudill is no abstract, drop-in tree-hugger, but a resident of Whitesburg, KY, Letcher County, who see from his own backyard the gaping yellow sideways wounds slashed into the steep wooded slopes around him. In the next county, hundreds of acres are baked iron-hard, ooze poisonous acid, and the dirt and rock that used to cover them form a slope of debris that looks like a set for All Quiet on the Western Front or the rampaging of a monster. Tucked into the greenery beyond the slope sits a cabin and abandoned cars, once the home of strip miners, long gone. Only in the late 1950s is Kentucky subjected to the heavy equipment that now runs continuously, removing...