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 a 1966 lecture before the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, historian Lynn White Jr. argued that Western Christianity, by de-sacralizing and using nature for human purposes, is responsible for the contemporary environmental crisis, as he later articulated in Science.