Ecology and guilt: a post-Christian recycling?

Résumé En

Several authors have suggested that militant environmentalism may have inherited Christianity and its denunciation of human pride. In a sometimes caricature way, it has been criticised for placing too much emphasis, as Christianity did, on the question of fault and guilt. This may seem paradoxical, since political ecology, at the time of its appearance in the 1970s, appeared to be very largely associated with left-libertarian currents that participated in the denunciation of what the historian Jean Delumeau has called the “Pastoral of fear”, within the framework of a “generalised cultural offensive against all forms of guilt and culpability” (Guillaume Cuchet). But the paradox is only apparent and results, as this article shows, from a still too frequent assimilation of morality, and with it of fault and guilt, to religion, whereas there is nothing specifically religious about them.