Why can’t I access python from a conda environment?

Creating a conda environment does NOT automatically include Python. Conda is general environment manager. You can have Python conda environments, R conda environments, Julia conda environments, etc.

You must specify that you want Python as well when you create it.

conda create -n test python

If you want an R environment, you can use:

conda create -n r-env r-base

For Julia:

conda create -n julia-env julia

Neither the R, nor the Julia envs have Python. Just like the Python env does not have R or Julia. An empty conda envirnment, is just that: empty.