However, I fear that if he did so, and remained true to his personal ethics, any future academic papers he published would need to be inscribed on narwhal tusks, perhaps (computers and paper being products of the carbon/industrial/slavery complex), or written in berry juice on a suitably flat piece of tree bark. Not an easy feat.

Then, once having chosen his virtuous, pre-industrial way of life, he might encounter a few more problems. Famine and malnourishment, perhaps, or tribal conflict. A waterborne infectious disease, or an intestinal parasite or maybe an ailment caused by wood smoke pollution. And even if he missed out on these attractive features of the developing world, there is surely something that he wouldn’t be able to avoid. Hard, unremitting manual work, especially if he took the subsistence farmer route. As he broke his back cultivating a field of yams or cassava for his very survival, he would know education to be a luxury that for him, and for his newfound subsistence-farmer comrades, would simply be out of reach without the benefits of economic progress. Once he actually became a Papuan highlander, when would he ever find the time, money or energy to go to university?

Dr Mouhot indeed has it backwards. Without the money to build schools and libraries, without the industry and advanced agriculture to generate that money, without the cheap, reliable, carbon-based fuel to power that industry and advanced agriculture, people in developing countries will remain stuck in appalling conditions of poverty, hardship and severe limitation. An apt name for these conditions would be – slavery.