Engineers Eliminate:the nuts and bolts of a first ascent

Martin sets off on the first pitch.

The plain facts are these; On Saturday 13^th July 2013 Al Hughes and I arrived at Cwm Silyn with the sole intention of an ascent on Craig Fawr. Our objective a one hundred and eighty two metre, very difficult, Engineers Climb put up on 10^th April 1925. Earlier that day the leader, E Dawes had led Herbert Carr and W McNaught on Overhanging Chimneys, a 100 metre severe at nearby Trwyn y Craig, subsequently held in high regard. Carr described it in his 1926 “A Climbers’ Guide to Snowden and the Beddegelert District” as...“A clean climb of great character and variety. Rubbers and  60ft of rope for the leader.”

The description further waxes lyrical for a page or so yet the much longer “Engineers” is disposed of in one paragraph, hardly inviting to prospective ascentionists. In more recent guidebooks however, we see that Engineers is heralded as a “good long climb” with a somewhat fuller description tempting those with an unusual interest towards rediscovery. That we would not make this ascent in the way prescribed was not due to any lack of information or disrespect for the original but more a curiosity to explore the prescient tasks set out before us like a gauntlet in stone.

Resting on open ground between the twin lakes it is possible to discern a boomerang arc shaping Silyns Cwm from Craig yr Ogof up and round tortuous scree slopes becoming lost in Clogwyn-y-Cysgod’s madness opposite the grey stoned great slab. It was here that George Mallory and Ralph Todhunter came in September 1911. Perhaps mesmerised by fruitful reconnaissance they chose not to attempt the slab preferring instead Y Cysgod’s brooding cliff of the shade and its four pitch gully to open climbing’s account. Awaiting us to the left, a thinner but equally tortuous ribbon of scree bordered by heather, concealing ankle snapping chasms, led towards unpeopled Craig Fawr whose high towered summit sentinelled the Nantlle Ridge.

Suffering in an unusual heat it was with great relief that we flung ourselves towards a goat cadavered gully before traversing some gross mosses under the shaded arm provided by the first easy rib. In twenty metres this rib landed us on a kind of bowling green half in shade, half out, whose inner kerb edged a steep walled groove with a perfectly solid belay pinnacle below. Slim at first this feature gradually deepened occasioning some stemming before side jugs allowed a jink left handily circumventing some suspect flakes.  Having elected to attempt this directissima now meant abandoning claims on our original concept and accepting grade increase which now reached the lofty height of ‘very severe, rubbers’. Finishing the groove by easier rock it came as a delight to find sound belays below a clean white slab whose summer inclined friction favoured ascent. It must be said, however, that rock reading from below does not always guarantee forgone conclusion and in a far less credible episode earlier in the week I had found myself barely five metres above the ground resorting to Yosemite aid tactics in a shallow scooped crack that, although positioned high above Machlyn Mawr, hardly counted as a mountaineering expedition and indeed had falsely represented itself when viewed from the deck as no more than HVS.

 Confirming these suspicions George Smith eventually completed the route at E2 6A. Then, as if to compound such experience, roughly the same thing happened on a crag further up the same hillside though at the point of realisation George was at least high enough to contemplate leaving a national flag attached to our lower off sling since neither of us could force a successful outcome. Furthermore, in order to incinerate several midge squadrons a fire started with sphagnum moss and it must be admitted, an uneco-worthy crisp carton, billowed smoke up the entire height of our intended route further limiting visibility and threatening asphyxiation.

Here on Craig Fawr under pleasanter conditions the slab more or less behaved as predicted before leading to a left slanting shallow crack where delicate footwork made possible stepping into a niche with perfect friend placement in its steepening right reveal. Al had commented that the moves looked “reasonably athletic for a middle aged man” And whilst this was so, nothing  more than 4C, required serious attention so that I was able to gaze out rightwards admiring the silhouettes climbing Craig yr Ogof’s final nose before moving up to a gargantuan block belay nesting in a bay.  Below us Trwyn y Craig blanketed in maroon heather stretched down its flanks towards plateaued marshland resplendent with micro lake which George and I had traversed earlier in the year after climbing the somewhat remote Crack at the End of the World in swirling cloud.

Al Hughes approaches the finish

The obstacle now confronting our undertaking came in the form of a chock stoned wide crack whose chaffing sides offered a way between its aperture that might have been wise to neglect. Landing above it on a wide ledge a vertical smooth corner with an obvious foothold above head height on its right wall and an amenable gear crack, posed the next problem.  Getting established on said foothold now focused concentration and subsequently became known as the ‘ruper step’ since it displayed difficulties at least as great as those encountered on some stair cased slate paving slabs leading to the back door of a house in Tregarth which under winter conditions had occasioned the scene of several failures by those under the influence of alcohol (Rupers) unwittingly approaching the premises after dark. In sober reckoning terms the corner proved around 5a and though it could, if necessary, be circumnavigated round to the right at a much easier standard, few suitors would wish to escape its charms.

Thus after laybacking onto the crucial foothold solid hand jambs allow reach to an unhelpful pod which is in turn exchanged for a grooved finale onto rough sloping rock at an angle of ease. Having progressed so far as to be comfortably seated below the final tower we saw that its square front face overhung showing a dramatic contrast between its intermittent leaning striations and less alarmingly steep rock running up ten metres or so towards a shadowed cleavage where both gradations met. Fearing any wind pipe gripping suspense that might ensue from attempts at surmounting the overhanging face we clung decisively to its right arête where grooved slabs and walls offered escape out on to an exposed veranda a top the nose.

Sun shafts burst a passing cloud so that over a hundred metres below boulders and moor land within grasp of the lake’s gently shimmering waters, were caught glowing a different hue. Far enough out from Yr Ogof, framed under Y Cysgod’s furrowed rim a peregrine’s wing showed rufus turning in dive and was gone. In a further thirty metres castellated ridge gave way to scrambling then Craig Fawr’s summit behind which, loping down the naked ridge we met Tony Loxton and splayed out to drink.

Such are the vagaries and fickle nature of mountain weather that after last year’s consistent deluge forecasters claimed torrential rain would again dominate our summertime. That this had not proved so came as a surprise. Perhaps a blip in the malfunctioning atmosphere caused it but, whatever the reason, we now basked on castellated rocks like legionnaires halted at the ruins of a dessert fortress before retreating in the grip of a heat wave that had started four weeks previously.

Descending Cysgod’s long arm with the crag of the hollow of the black lake basking in silence to our left we stopped at a vantage point taking in Yr Ogof’s great slab now curiously hazed in infra red glow. We recall that Noel Odell, the last man to see his friends George Mallory and Sandy Irvine alive on Everest, numbered the first ascent party doing Ordinary Route in 1926 and that John Menlove Edwards, one of the great tragic figures of welsh climbing, found the majestic Outside Edge in 1931. Remembering some lines from Andre Mignot in Tibetan Marches ‘to neglect one’s own or one’s dependants interests is not a mark of discernment’

So downwards we went under evenings spell, between the long hills and the tall sky, our figures set out in silhouette, hearing the call from secret radongs and keeping time on the stony path we quickened the pace, dreaming of ale.

An account of the first ascent of Engineers Eliminate: 180 metres, Very Severe-  Craig Fawr, Cwm Silyn. N Wales.First ascent Martin Crook, Al Hughes. 13/7/2013

 Martin Crook: 2013.Photos-Tony Loxton. 

Anniversaries: Sea Stacks and new routes on the Point of Stoer

Paul on the first ascent of Haramosh:

For our wedding anniversaries I try to give my wife, who doesn't climb much, a present of a memorable adventure. I thought The Old Man of Stoer in the North West of Scotland would provide it; a VS/HVS route, exposure, abseils, a swim to the base, what more could she ask? On the day, she won the toss for the swim lowering herself into the icy sea with the rope end tied to her waist. I rigged the Tyrolean and came over dry and fully clad with the rest of the climbing gear as she muttered darkly. She had a few grip­ping moments climbing and coming down the airy abseils, and congratulated herself on avoid­ing the fulmar chicks occupying the ledges. These sea birds with attitude cover you with pungent puke if you get too close — not difficult on a sea cliff, since their range is easily four feet. We had a perfect day ,after all, the attraction of these wonderfully situated climbs is not the grade but the whole atmosphere.

Safely back at the top of the mainland cliff Marea said how much she'd enjoyed it. Was this the moment to tell her what I'd spotted as we sat in the sunshine atop the Old Man. For clearly visible half a mile north were two very promi­nent lines on a striking piece of cliff at the actual Point of Stoer. The new Northern Highlands guidebook made no mention of any climbs in the area other than on the Old Man, so I inno­cently suggested a picnic for the next day.

As we set off she looked suspiciously at my enormous pack but I said I had some gear to maybe shunt something while she was painting. Marea settled down with her watercolours and I scrambled along the narrow point to the top of the very large corner I had seen. With perfect, clean rock it looked just too good to be true. I tied off my 180ft rope and threw it down the cliff, the end whistling out of sight towards the sea.

Abseiling down the corner I soon realised after kicking off a few loose blocks that indeed it had not been climbed and surprisingly looked fairly easy. One large block I inadvertently knocked off ricocheted down my rope, but checking quickly I couldn't see any damage. (A week or so later back in Borrowdale, I was do­ing a free abseil on a single strand down a possi­ble new route on Upper Falcon Crag when right before my eyes the sheath parted and out spurted the innards of the rope. I quickly clamped an ascender above the tear and then tied an over­hand knot around it before I could continue—very upset at losing my best rope.)

The Old Man of Stoer

I carried on descending with the rope fortu­nately reaching a platform about 160ft down, just above the high tide mark. I clipped on the Shunt and marvelled as I climbed back up this superb line, at about Severe standard. I enthused over it to Marea and since I'd luckily brought her shoes and harness in the pack it wasn't too long before I persuaded her to abseil down the single fixed rope to the platform. Using our spare 9mm rope we climbed the two pitch route with much en­joyment. Although to our right was a very large bird colony we met no nesting birds on this climb, which we called simply The Great Comer.

About 40ft to its left was the other corner line I had spotted from the Old Man but inspec­tion from above was difficult because of the over­hangs in that area of the cliff. I got Marea down to the platform again so that I could attempt this route on sight. It looked quite spectacular and a lot more difficult but I convinced her if it proved too hard for her, she could jumar back up the abseil rope. I had to descend slightly to reach the foot of the corner, a little below the high water mark. Once in the corner the climb­ing was much easier than it appeared and a wonderful Hard Severe. One 11Oft pitch brought me to a flat edge under a roof right on the prow of the Point of Stoer.

Marea soon joined me, pleasantly surprised by the reasonably easy grade. A few feet above the belay ledge was a perfect roof split by a head sized off width crack. Climbing this crack would have made the route much more difficult but it just looked too tempting. The alternative was a very exposed, scary looking traverse under the roof and above another roof into territory with no obvious outcome. After a couple of attempts at the crack, where both times my helmet be­came jammed, I realised a slip after cutting loose through the roof could result in me hanging in space by my helmet — not a pretty sight. Now I would have to make the exposed traverse right which once again proved easier than it looked.

The lines of Haramosh and The Great Corner

A little groove appeared to the right of the roof and enabled me to traverse left until I was back at the top of the crack and directly above Marea. So far the route had been free of any puking fulmars. Now ten feet from the top sat a very fat chick and by the look on his face, he was fully loaded... On the Old Man of Hoy I'd encountered both adult birds and chicks defending themselves with an apparent inexhaustible supply so I devel­oped the technique of waggling my foot just out of range enticing them to discharge and nipping past in the few gulping seconds they take to re­load. Fortunately this one was in a good position for the waggle technique. I dodged as two good-sized bursts of half-digested fish went whizzing down the crack to score a direct hit on Marea's helmet and brand new wind parka.

She was not a happy lady.The birds once overtaken show no further signs of distress, and generally sea birds act unfazed by our presence. I've seen puffins hap­pily feeding sand eels to their young as I was belayed two feet away. My timing was perfect and I pulled out unscathed on to the top of this great little route. The final pitch, though very exposed, proved no more than mild VS — a truly perfect outcome to a perfect day. I held my nose and gave Marea a celebration hug. We had been very fortunate to find two three star routes of pure enjoyment in a perfect setting and I would not swap the experience of climbing these two gems for the World's hardest E9 bolt ladder.

 

The next day we headed north to the sea cliffs of Sheigra near Cape Wrath. Here I shunted some excellent routes put up by my old Alpha Club friend, Paul Nunn, who began exploring in this area when I was living in the US. I had missed this early scene but noticed in the new guide that Paul was still exploring these areas, and re­solved to tell him how great I found them, and if ever he needed a partner I'd be really keen.

Ar­riving home we found that two days before our ascents on the Point of Stoer, Paul had been killed in the Karakoram on the way down from the first ascent of a mountain called Haramosh 11. Long ago in 1965 he and I shared some good times new routeing on Eagle Crag in Borrowdale and one of these routes he named The Sprogg in honour of my son Andrew, born two days prior to the ascent. In return, I thought it a fitting trib­ute to name our beautifully situated climb on the Point of Stoer Haramosh. Paul's favourite retreat was the North West of Scotland and the Stoer Peninsula embodies all the mystic beauty he loved so well.

Paul Ross: First published in High-162. 

All images-Paul Ross Collection

50 years after 'Silent Spring'

Silent Spring has come to be regarded as an environmental classic which instigated the modern environmental movement. The book’s warning about the dangers of pesticides touched a nerve, but also reflected wider concerns in the emerging counter-culture of the sixties – that modern technologies, combined with rampant consumerism, were causing environmental problems that had otherwise not been widely noticed or, worse, suppressed by vested interests.

Personally, the book has a special meaning.  It was one of the first books that I borrowed when a public library opened in our village in 1962, when I was 14.  How much of the book I actually read, I cannot now remember – but what I can recall is the impact that the introduction made upon me then.  It was almost like reading the science fiction to which I was addicted at that time:

There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of colour that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer silently across the fields, half hidden in the mists of the autumn mornings.

Among the roads, laurel, viburnum and alder, great ferns and wildflowers delighted the traveller’s eye through much of the year. Even in winter the roadsides were places of beauty, where countless birds came to feed on the berries and on the seed heads of the dried weeds rising above the snow. The countryside was, in fact, famous for the abundance and variety of its bird life, and when the flood of migrants was pouring through in spring and autumn people travelled from great distances to observe them. Others came to fish the streams, which flowed clear and cold out of the hills and contained shady pools where trout lay. Sot it had been from the days many years ago when the first settlers raised their houses, sank their wells, and built their barns.

Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens; the cattle and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was a shadow of death. The farmers spoke of much illness among their families. In the town the doctors had become more and more puzzled by new kinds of sickness appearing among their patients. There had been several sudden and unexplained deaths, not only among adults but even among children, who would be stricken suddenly while at play and die within a few hours.

There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example – where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled an disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.

On the farms the hens brooded, but no chicks hatched. The farmers complained that they were unable to raise any pigs – the litters were small and the young survived only a few days. The apple trees were coming into bloom but no bees droned among the blossoms, so there was no pollination and there would be no fruit.

The roadsides, once so attractive, were now lined with browned and withered vegetation as though swept by fire. These, too, were silent, deserted by all living things. Even the streams were now lifeless. Anglers no longer visited them, for all the fish had died.

In the gutters under the eaves and between the shingles of the roofs, a white granular powder still showed a few patches; some weeks before it had fallen like snow upon the roofs and the lawns, the fields and the streams.

No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.

This town does not actually exist, but it might easily have a thousand counterparts in America or elsewhere in the world. I know of no community that has experienced all the misfortunes I describe. Yet every one of these disasters has actually happened somewhere, and many real communities have already suffered a substantial number of them. A grim spectre has crept upon us almost unnoticed, and this imagined tragedy may easily become a stark reality we all shall know.

It was here that, for the first time, I was introduced to the idea of the inter-connectedness of all living things, and the pernicious effects of industrial development on the environment.  It was a concept that sank like a pebble in a pool, lost in my consciousness for many years, but resurfacing a decade or so later. For someone of the ‘ban-the bomb’ generation, reading the following passage so soon after the Cuban Missile Crisis was particularly alarming:

The history of life on earth has been a history of interaction between living things and their surroundings. To a large extent, the physical form and the habits of the earth’s vegetation and its animal life have been molded by the environment. Considering the whole span of earthly time, the opposite effect, in which life actually modifies its surroundings, has been relatively slight. Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species man acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world.

During the past quarter century this power has not only increased to one of disturbing magnitude but it has changed in character. The most alarming of all man’s assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials. This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates not only in the world that must support life but in living tissues is for the most part irreversible. In this now universal contamination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world and the very nature of life. Strontium 90, released through nuclear explosions into the air, comes to earth in rain or drifts down as fallout, lodges in soil, enters into the grass or corn or wheat grown there, and in time takes up its abode in the bones of a human being, there to remain until his death. Similarly, chemicals sprayed on crop lands or forests or gardens lie long in soil, entering into living organisms, passing from one to another in a chain of poisoning and death. Or they pass mysteriously by underground streams until they emerge and, through the alchemy of air and sunlight, combine into new forms that kill vegetation, sicken cattle, and work unknown harm on those who drink from once pure wells. As Albert Schweitzer has said, “Man can hardly even recognize the devils of his own creation.”

It took hundreds of millions of years to produce the life that now inhabits the earth eons of time in which that developing and evolving and diversifying life reached a state of adjustment and balance with its surroundings. The environment, rigorously shaping and directing the life it supported, contained elements that were hostile as well as supporting. Certain rocks gave out dangerous radiation; even within the light of the sun, from which all life draws its energy, there were short-wave radiations with power to injure. Given time – time not in years but in millennia -  life adjusts, and a balance has been reached. For time is the essential ingredient; but in the modern world there is no time.

The rapidity of change and the speed with which new situations are created follow the impetuous and heedless pace of man rather than the deliberate pace of nature. Radiation is no longer merely the background radiation of rocks, the bombardment of cosmic rays, the ultraviolet of the sun that have existed before there was any life on earth; radiation is now the unnatural creation of man’s tampering with the atom. The chemicals to which life is asked to make its adjustment are no longer merely the calcium and silica and copper and all the rest of the minerals washed out of the rocks and carried in rivers to the sea; they are the synthetic creations of man’s inventive mind, brewed in his laboratories, and having no counterparts in nature.

To adjust to these chemicals would require time on the scale that is nature’s; it would require not merely the years of a man’s life but the life of generations. And even this, were it by some miracle possible, would be futile, for the new chemicals come from our laboratories in an endless stream; almost five hundred annually find their way into actual use in the United States alone. The figure is staggering and its implications are not easily grasped: five hundred new chemicals to which the bodies of men and animals are required somehow to adapt each year, chemicals totally outside the limits of biologic experience.

Among them are many that are used in man’s war against nature. Since the mid-1940′s over 200 basic chemicals have been created for use in killing insects, weeds, rodents, and other organisms described in the modem vernacular as “pests”; and they are sold under several thousand different brand names.

These sprays, dusts, and aerosols are now applied almost universally to farms, gardens, forests, and homes nonselective chemicals that have the power to kill every insect, the “good” and the “bad,” to still the song of birds and the leaping of fish in the streams, to coat the leaves with a deadly film, and to linger on in soil all this though the intended target may be only a few weeds or insects. Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life? They should not be called “insecticides,” but “biocides.”

Along with the possibility of the extinction of mankind by nuclear war, the central problem of our age has therefore become the contamination of man’s total environment with such substances of incredible potential for harm substances that accumulate in the tissues of plants and animals and even penetrate the germ cells to shatter or alter the very material of heredity upon which the shape of the future depends. . . .

What is the legacy of Silent Spring?  There are some interesting opinions and archive materials in this discussion, hosted on The Guardian website,while the Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson can be explored on this website.

There’s an excellent essay, Re-Reading Silent Spring, published by Earth Island Journal that draws attention to how much was already known in 1962 about the environmental health impacts of petrochemicals, and how little the  regulatory response to the environmental impact of chemicals has changed, despite the advances in scientific understanding since then:

Reading Silent Spring today, it is disquieting to realize how much was already known in 1962 about the environmental health impacts of petrochemicals. Even more shocking is to recognize how little our regulatory response to these chemicals’ effects has changed, despite the past five decades’ great advances in scientific understanding.

Best known for its alarming account of DDT’s decimation of bird life across the United States, Silent Spring is widely credited with sparking the public concern that lead to the chemical’s ban in the US ten years later. “Over increasingly large areas of the United States, spring now comes unheralded by the return of birds, and the early mornings, once filled with the beauty of bird song, are strangely silent,” Carson wrote, describing the toll pesticide use had taken on American birds. Without changes in practice, brought about in part by Silent Spring, the bald eagle (whose numbers had plummeted to about 400 breeding pairs in the continental US by 1963) might well have disappeared from the lower 48 states.

But Carson also described the accumulation of synthetic chemicals in people – including newborns – and these chemicals’ interaction with the innermost workings of living cells. “For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death,” Carson wrote. “These chemicals are now stored in the bodies of the vast majority of human beings, regardless of age. They occur in the mother’s milk, and probably in the tissues of the unborn child,” wrote Carson more than 40 years before an Environmental Working Group study found 287 industrial chemicals in newborns’ umbilical cord blood, and decades before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began finding such chemicals in the majority of Americans tested.

A year ago I wrote that I had been listening to The Essay on Radio 3:  five talks on the theme ‘Before Silent Spring‘ in which five writers, scientists and environmental campaigners reflected on how Carson built on the work of others who had gone before her, figures whose ideas preceded Silent Spring and laid the foundations of the contemporary environmental movement.  Read that post here.

Footnote

There’s an excellent essay in the Guardian by Margaret Attwood in which she assesses the significance of Silent Spring.  Here’s an extract:

One of the core lessons of Silent Spring was that things labelled progress weren’t necessarily good. Another was that the perceived split between man and nature isn’t real: the inside of your body is connected to the world around you, and your body too has its ecology, and what goes into it – whether eaten or breathed or drunk or absorbed through your skin – has a profound impact on you. We’re so used to thinking this way now that it’s hard to imagine a time when general assumptions were different. But before Carson, they were.

In those years, nature was an “it”, an impersonal and unconscious force; or, worse, malignant: a nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw bent on afflicting humanity with all the weapons at its disposal. Against brute nature stood “we”, with our consciousness and intelligence. We were a higher order of being, and thus we had a mandate to tame nature as if it were a horse, subdue it as if it were an enemy, and “develop” it as if it were a female bustline or a male set of Charles Atlas biceps – how awful to be underdeveloped! We could then exploit nature’s resources, which were thought of as inexhaustible.

Three streams of thinking fed into this civilisation/savagery construct. The first was biblical dominionism: in Genesis, God proclaims that man has dominion over the animals, and this was construed by some as permission to annihilate them. The second was informed by the machine metaphors that colonised linguistic space after the invention of the clock, and that spread across the west during the 18th-century enlightenment: the universe was an unfeeling machine, and life forms too were machines, without souls or consciousness or even feeling. Therefore they could be abused at will, because they weren’t really suffering. Man alone had a soul, situated inside the machine of his body (possibly, thought some, in the pituitary gland). In the 20th century, scientists threw out the soul but kept the machine: for a strangely long time, they held that to ascribe anything like human emotions to animals was anthropocentrism.

Ironically, this was a direct contradiction of the granddaddy of modern biology, Charles Darwin, who had always maintained the interconnectedness of life, and – like any dog owner or farmer or hunter – was well aware of animal emotions.

The third line of thinking came – again ironically – from social Darwinism. Man was “fitter” than the animals, by virtue of his intelligence and his uniquely human emotions; thus in the struggle for existence man deserved to triumph, and nature would have to give way eventually to a fully “humanised” environment.

But Carson questioned this dualism. Whatever airs we might give ourselves, “we” were not distinct from “it”: we were part of it, and could live only inside it. To think otherwise was self-destructive:

The “control of nature” is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. The concepts and practices of applied entomology for the most part date from that Stone Age of science. It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth.

Gerry Cordon: First Published on-That's How The Light Gets In.