Secondly, the reactions to the Kuwait fires illustrate the fact that different people interpret the world differently. Those who stressed the ecological repercussions of the battle, rather than the political, social, or economic consequences, were a minority. On the view that language games are sets of rules for selecting and mixing facts and values concerning the way the world fares and ought to fare, the Greens seem to be playing a different game. (I will use the word ‘Green’ to denote all variants of the environmentalist and ecologist persuasions.)

This last observation will serve as my point of departure. I am not interested-at least not here-in the question: ‘What is to be done, given the ecological crisis?’ For the sake of argument I shall suppose that this is a legitimate question with a definite answer. I thus assume that there is an ecological crisis in a malleable world, that this crisis can perhaps be controlled in some way or other, and that we should control it if we can. My question is rather: ‘Given a necessary course of action directed towards the environmental crisis, can we defend it in terms of distributive justice?’