This study deals with the relationship and interconnections between environmental discourse and the critique of modernity. Firstly, it demonstrates how the environmental paradigm has become a structure for scientific research, influencing political and social fields and producing social movements. It also shows how that overlaps with the main schools of the critique of modernity in Europe since the beginning of the 20th century in terms of their critique of reason. The study concludes that environmental thought is just one aspect of the ethical crisis of modernity, intersecting with the principal critics of technological civilization based on rational action and that the drive for profit within capitalist modes of production has destroyed nature and society. Notably, environmental crises are inevitably accompanied by social crises.