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This article deals with the emergence of a Marxist environmental sociology in the United States. Beyond a great variety of trends, sociologists such as John Bellamy Foster, James O’Connor and Ted Benton began to develop an exegetic approach to Marx during the 1990s. Their aim was to find a few scattered elements of an ecology present in Marx’s works, below the text. In fact, this approach is a construction (rather than a re-construction) of sociological arguments for a Marxist environmental sociology approach. By enlisting Marx in their conceptualization of a new branch of sociology, Foster, O’Connor and Benton merely reproduce the founding gesture of any discipline, by seeking an unassailable legitimacy from totemic authors.