After decades of political programs and economic strategies, efforts toward sustainable development are in crisis. Caught between greenwashing and global climate challenges, people around the world are searching for a holistic orientation. In 2025, the World Goetheanum Association, the Section for Agriculture at the Goetheanum, and many partner organizations met at Sekem in Egypt, where a new understanding began to take shape: sustainable development as a process of inner and outer transformation, as the art of becoming, where nature, culture, society, and spirituality come together.
The concept of “sustainable development” is overused, underdefined, and often misunderstood. Sustainable development is not a nice-to-have, a reporting requirement, a tool for manipulation, or a Western invention. It explores the question of humanity’s and the Earth’s becoming—a question that anthroposophy is deeply interwoven with. After 50 years of institutionalized use and a poor reputation due to greenwashing and empty words, the call for an integration of inner and spiritual dimensions into the concept of sustainable development as an emerging meta-discipline is growing louder.
Global Upheaval—A Turning Point in Time
In 2025, something that had been brewing beneath the surface for a long time came to pass: a so-called turning point. A geopolitical upheaval changed the world order, accompanied by massive rearmament and a new focus by governments on national self-interest. In this climate, NATO states decided to allocate five percent of their gross domestic product to defense. This happened despite eight decades of intensive efforts to promote universal human rights and global responsibility, and despite initiatives such as the WWF, Rachel Carson’s ecological wake-up call, Greenpeace, the Club of Rome’s report “The Limits to Growth,” and the Brundtland Report “Our Common Future.” The turning point seems to be pushing aside everything that generations have achieved in terms of ecological and social insight. To say that it came as a surprise would be to ignore the signs that had long been visible—and yet it came as a shock to many.
This change especially shook the social, green, and pacifist movements that have been growing since the 1960s. Ingolf Blühdorn, a sociologist from Vienna specializing in social sustainability, even postulates that this “eco-emancipatory project” has ultimately failed due to its own inconsistencies and because it didn’t reach the whole of society—the project remained exclusive. As a result, people and organizations working with socio-ecological challenges and sustainable development are more or less forced to realign their understanding of this discipline and their tools for transforming society.
The Three Pillars of Sustainable Development
Sustainable development is not a new concept. Even in ancient Greece, guiding principles such as “Know thyself,” a call to develop one’s inner self, and “Nothing in excess,” a reminder to bring our relationship with the world into balance, were already in place. Much later, in 1801, Alexander von Humboldt, the younger brother of Wilhelm von Humboldt and a close friend of Goethe, warned of the destructive greed of humankind, which not only threatened the Earth but could potentially even conquer other stars.
Rudolf Steiner added another trailblazing chapter. In view of the growing power of capitalism and technology, he conceived the idea of the threefold social order: freedom in the spiritual life, justice in the social and legal life, and fellowship in the economic life. For Steiner, nature was the basis of all economic activity—a perspective that even at the time touched upon the core elements of what we now understand as sustainable development.
With the world population quadrupling since 1945 and the strain on the Earth caused by human activities, sustainable development was finally institutionalized. Three main pillars were established worldwide: ecological, social, and economic. The guiding principle was “to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”1 To date, this is the only generally accepted definition. There are around 200 other academic definitions that have not achieved comparable acceptance.
New Vision of Sustainable Development
Ibrahim and Helmy Abouleish, together with many others, founded the Sekem Initiative and Heliopolis University for Sustainable Development in Egypt with a clearly stated orientation on sustainable development. Their approach was radical and visionary: they separated human and cultural development (guided by freedom) from the traditional social pillar (guided by equality). This was because justice in legal life and freedom in the cultural and spiritual sphere need to be valued independently and equally.
This gave rise to four pillars of sustainable development, supplemented by Rudolf Steiner’s social threefolding: the ecological pillar (nature as the basis of human activity), the social pillar (guided by justice), the cultural pillar (guided by freedom), and the economic pillar (guided by solidarity). On this foundation, after almost five decades of pioneering work, Sekem was awarded the UN Environment Programme’s “Champion of the Earth 2024 Prize” and the “Gulbenkian Prize for Humanity 2024,” two of the world’s most prestigious environmental awards.
Expansion to the Spiritual Dimension
The World Goetheanum Forum in Sekem gave rise to a new perspective on sustainable development, one that encompasses the spiritual dimension. The inner and individual source of spirituality now stands at the center of Sekem’s sustainability flower. According to the participants, every external development needs an inner life, conscious training, and spiritual anchoring.
At the same time, the ecological pillar was reorganized. It now forms the supporting foundation for “social relations” (guided by justice), “cultural and human development” (guided by freedom), and “economic value creation” (guided by love and solidarity). Nature is thus understood not only as one of four equally valued pillars but as the foundation upon which all the others are built.
In addition, the sustainability flower has been expanded to include the comprehensive dimension of “spiritual and cosmic sources”—a level that, according to environmental activist Paul Kingsnorth, has been largely lost in modern Western societies and whose absence is leading humanity to the brink of disaster. This expanded view also includes topics such as accompanying old, dying social structures, acknowledging historical shadows, and developing spaces of consciousness and communication skills in situations where human dignity is violated. A long-standing indication of this new approach can be found in Rudolf Steiner: “In pain, our Mother Earth solidified. Our mission is to spiritualize her again, to redeem her, by transforming her through the strength of our hands into a spirit-filled work of art.”2
This creates an appropriate anthropocentrism—a positive image of human beings as co-creators of the Earth and of the Earth as the substance of our destiny. Sustainable development thereby progresses from a political or economic goal to an “art of becoming” that combines external activity with inner training and spiritual responsibility.
The Publication
In November 2025, a compendium titled On the Earth We Want to Live: Anthroposophy’s Contributions to Sustainable Development was published. In it, seventy-five co-authors explore the question of how anthroposophy can contribute to sustainable development in its practical implementation. Twenty-three scientists and twenty-six enterprises share their perspectives. In addition, an expansion of the current understanding of sustainable development is developed, in which the inner and spiritual dimensions of sustainable development are specifically examined. The initiative proceeds from the Section for Agriculture at the Goetheanum and is anchored in the Section’s Department for Sustainable Development. The work is published by Springer Nature in its World Sustainability Series, one of the world’s leading scientific publishers with almost 200 years of history. One of the aims of this work is to build bridges between the discourse and specialist areas of sustainable development with anthroposophy, its global movement, and the Goetheanum as an Independent Institute for Spiritual Science.
Available as a free eBook/PDF or for purchase as a hardback: On the Earth We Want to Live – Anthroposophy’s Contributions to Sustainable Development edited by Johannes Kronenberg and Edith T. Lammerts van Bueren. World Sustainability Series (Cham: Springer, 2025)
Translation Joshua Kelberman
Title image Portraits of participants at the World Goetheanum Forum 2025 in Sekem. Photo: Samuel Knaus
Footnotes
- UNESCO, Policy Document for the Integration of a Sustainable Development Perspective into the Processes of the World Heritage Convention, adopted by the General Assembly of States Parties to the World Heritage Convention at its 20th session (2015).
- Rudolf Steiner, Rosicrucianism Renewed: The Unity of Art, Science & Religion: The Theosophical Congress of Whitsun 1907, CW 284 (Great Barrington, MA: SteinerBooks, 2007), “Address by Rudolf Steiner at the Foundation Stone Laying for the Rosicrucian Temple of the ‘Francis of Assisi’ Lodge of Malsch,” April 5/6, 1909.
