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As Alastair says, it’s all very well arguing about what justice is – as the Politeia does – but the material environment to which we are collectively exposed and for which we are collectively responsible pre-exists any community, however it is organised, and must therefore be taken into account. Which it is not, by Plato.

The reason for this is fairly simple; Plato’s ideal communities in the Politeia and Nomoi dealt with societies which were farmers and cottage producers. They were not having the same impact on the environment and, as various inscriptions dating grain sent from the Bosphorus and Egypt to wealthy Athens in the fourth century attest, did not produce even such a surplus as to be safe from famine for the relatively small population they did have.

Moreover, Plato deals with the Greek world – large tracts of the earth were at that time inhabited by nomadic tribes, not the populous civilisations that produced much larger surpluses and eventually gave birth to our own.

Factoring this into the equation, Plato’s injunction that justice is ‘to do one’s own business and not be a busy body’ (an interesting inversion of Pericles’ epitaphios in Thucydides) can be seen to violate his own eudaimonistic principles. Or, if you prefer the argument which Socrates employs against Thrasymachus, if a just system is one in which no one makes mistakes and laws are made in the interests of all, an environmentalist mentality is inherent to Platonian ethics.

So what do you think Plato was discussing 2500 years ago before there were even words for “ecology” or “environmentalism”?

There are no politics, economics, or society without ecology – civilisation is a top-heavy pyramid which depends on a healthy landbase (not so healthy, biodiversity is a scale on red right warning now; peak oil has occured, etc). Ethics through this lense results in being green for the solutions to environmental ills and all the ills of society that flow from it, a fundamentalist belief in capitalism as somehow equating to a natural state of man, and the deaths of millions in some countries because we cannot organise ourselves economically very effectively in such large numbers, the a-ethical and a-moral practices of politics, consumerist culture and profound disconnection from our natural habitat.

Lucas’ fault is to dirty her green credentials by getting involved in the ‘nuanced’ (ie, sociopathic) world of politics. Yes, oxymoron – one cannot be unethically political and be green which is a subset of ethics. The Green Party has also gone a step closer to this by ending their collegiate leadership approach in favour of one leader who can ‘embody ideals and carry messages’. By the time they get any meaningful number of seats they will be as corrupt as the rest of Westminster.