Historian Lynn White Jr. made the argument in a 1966 lecture before the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, subsequently published in the journal Science, that Western Christianity, having de-sacralized and instrumentalized nature to human ends, bears a substantial "burden of guilt" for the contemporary environmental crisis.
In his 1966 lecture delivered at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, historian Lynn White Jr. argued that Western Christianity, by de-sacralizing and employing nature for human goals, is responsible for the current environmental crisis, a notion later published in Science.