In Amity and Prosperity, as elsewhere, resource extraction has long fed a sense of marginalization and disgust, both with companies that undermine the land and with the urbanites who flick on lights without considering the miners who risk their lives to power them. Today, the fracking boom has reinforced these convictions.
-- Narration (The Author) (Note)

Importance: This quote, from what amounts to an introduction to the book as a whole, sets out a fundamental component of the tensions that contribute to the conflicts that the book chronicles: the sense of a clear moral, political, economic, and cultural divide between urban and rural philosophies and practices.

…where she came from, no one liked a complainer. Stacey was well aware that Amity’s most respective citizens held some of the most lucrative leases. But her greatest concern was that if she spoke out against Range Resources, the company would take her [water tank] away. Without it, she...
-- Narration (Part 1, Chapter 4 )