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The aim of this article is to determine the usefulness of imagination in the ethical response to the current ecological crisis. The first part of this article is devoted to an analysis of the place Hans Jonas gives to imagination in his construction of an environmental ethics in The Imperative of Responsibility. Imagination makes it possible to fill in the gap between acts and their effects. Therefore, using imagination is necessary in order to apply the heuristics of fear and to identify ethical imperatives, as well as to put in practice the ethics of responsibility. The second part questions the relevance of the use of imagination in a context of ecological crisis, in which much of the effects of environmental damage can be seen now, rather than in the future. The assumed thesis is that imagination remains useful for putting the ethics of responsibility into practice. It is justified by a persistent spatial distance between acts and their ecological effects, and by the incitative property of imagination.