"Turning my back on modern agriculture on one side, and modern industry on the other, I climbed past the snowline for the ascent of Moelwyn Mawr. The first snow of the year, which lay deep and crisp, covered the tracks of summer hikers and the fissures of frost- broken rock. The place seemed utterly pure and pristine. The air was sharp and bracing. Swirls of mist passed over me, hiding the winter sun, cutting me off from all except the rolling expanse of white snow around. As I placed one foot after the other in the crisp snow, my head emptied of the chatter of the valley and the petty daily worries. I felt one with the white mountain which stood like an old man who had taken many knocks but still maintained his integrity.

But as I neared the summit, I suddenly felt strangely melancholy. However much I tried, I could not prevent the stark truth invading my mind. The snow around me was not pure and pristine; it was made from acid rain and was contaminated with radioactivity. The air was not clean; it contained an artificial excess of hydrocarbons. A man-made layer of carbon dioxide lay between me and the sun, inexorably heating up the globe. In a hundred years, there might not be any more snow falling on this mountain. Nature, in the sense of the world independent of man, has come to an end. The human species, which has sought to climb the highest mountains and to dive into the deepest seas, has so dominated nature that it has begun to transform it irredeemably.

At the top of the mountain, a few crows had left their mark in the snow. As if to confirm my gloomiest thoughts, a red fighter aeroplane roared low up the valley below, practising no doubt with dummy nuclear Beneath its surface beauty, nature has become scarred and poisoned. God, if he ever existed. is dead, and only the faintest glimpse of Wordsworth's 'mighty Mind' can be discerned in the roar of the mountain torrents and the whistling wind of the peaks"