‘“Almost all uses of land will entail some infringement on some other piece of land that is owned by someone else. So how can that ever be permitted? No story about freedom and property rights can ever justify the pollution of the air or the burning of fuels because those things affect the freedom and property rights of others. Those actions ultimately cause damage to surrounding property and people without getting any consent from those affected. They are the ethical equivalent – for honest libertarians – of punching someone in the face or breaking someone else’s window.”

So here we have a simple and coherent explanation of why libertarianism is so often associated with climate change denial and the playing down or dismissal of other environmental issues. It would be impossible for the owner of a power station, steel plant, quarry, farm or any large enterprise to obtain consent for all the trespasses he commits against other people’s property – including their bodies.’

Today, conservation officials in Kenya often concede that traditional grazing could be permitted in the parks and reserves without driving out the wildlife. But the local people must continue to be excluded because the tourists “don’t expect to see them there”. The tourists don’t expect to see them there largely because the television shows them that healthy wildlife habitats are places without people. By presenting the natural world as something apart from humanity, it creates the impression that conservation means exclusion. If those who seek to venture through the back of the television and into the world which Attenborough has made find that it is, in fact, very much like our own, with all the conflicts and difficulties which arise wherever human beings live, they will complain. So the primary task of conservationists in the former colonies is to convert the real world into the virtual one which the tourists have seen on TV.