An examination of the role metaphor plays in the scientific as well as popular discussion of key environmental issues, e.g., global warming and loss of biodiversity. This discourse, here termed "Greenspeak," rests on a few basic conceptual metaphors, which project inferences from a limited set of source domains, e.g., "war," onto the target domain of the environment. Together with the image schema of "containment," which provides one of the most important scientific models of the environment, the I concept of "earth as a greenhouse" serves as the locus of the "battlefield" of the metaphorical war on the environment. Finally, conflicting systems of moral accounting underpinning Greenspeak are compared, and serious problems with utilitarian models are suggested. (Copyright 1998, Sociological Abstracts, Inc., all rights reserved.) (LLBA 1998, vol. 32, n. 1)