Over the past 25 years, political ecologism emerged as an original political theory, while most existing political theories, from anarchism to Rawlsian liberalism, re-invented themselves as theories embracing ideas like environment and sustainability. Only (classic) libertarianism seems untouched. Libertarianism may not be a strong political force in its own right, in mediated forms it is still extremely influential – recent examples would range from Third Way social democracy in Europe to the present-day Tea Party in the USA. The paper seeks to remove this veil of ignorance. It asks a question that precedes any discussion of what, from a libertarian point of view, humans can and should do with or abstain from doing to nature: how libertarians understand ‘nature’ in the first place. I shall compare libertarian conceptions of nature with similar ontological concepts like wilderness and environment, and with more epistemological constructions like nature as the essence of things or as the realm of necessity (the apparent opposite of liberty). I submit that there is a fundamental difference in the appreciation of nature by classic right-wing libertarians (Nozick, Narveson) and modern left-libertarians (Steiner). Yet this reflects not so much a difference in political as in environmental perspectives: a typically American, Lockeian perception of nature as wilderness, versus a typically European, Grotian reduction of nature to a form of cultivation - as e.g. Peter Vallentyne’s work illustrates. I end by investigating how a greener libertarianism might prompt ‘orthodox’ political ecologists to critically rethink their own conception(s) of nature.
