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Chapter 11 considers Pennsylvania’s Hatboro-Horsham School District (HHSD)’s determination that the proposed Good Earth Charter School (GE) is religiously sectarian. GE is a Waldorf Methods school, premised on Rudolf Steiner’s (1861-1925) anthroposophy, a religious cosmology that explains humanity’s spiritual evolution from cosmic origins and anticipates humanity’s attainment of divine nature. Although Waldorf charter schools withstood a legal challenge in California in PLANS, Inc. v. Sacramento City Unified School Distict, Twin Ridges Elementary School District (1998–2012), HHSD found that GE’s curriculum, teacher training, and affiliations reflect its anthroposophic foundations. Contrasting the California and Pennsylvania cases illustrates how resource disparities can affect legal determinations of what counts as religion. This chapter argues that Waldorf Methods charter schools illustrate how a pedagogical approach can be secular and religious. GE’s curriculum is aligned with state educational standards, and there are public Waldorf Methods schools that promote secular interests by offering an arts-focused education to students who otherwise could not afford it. Yet, Waldorf’s distinctive pedagogy—including its meditation practices—is an outgrowth of Steiner’s esoteric understanding of child development. Modern anthroposophists have in two separate court cases argued successfully that anthroposophy is a religion for free exercise purposes.

Anthroposophy’s contribution to environmentalism is evident not only in biodynamic agriculture and green banking but also across the spectrum of anthroposophical initiatives. One of the most holistic movements inspired by Steiner is the international network of Camphill communities, where people with and without developmental disabilities share daily life and work, often in agricultural settings. Camphill communities often function as innovative ecovillages, embracing carbon-neutral energy systems, biological wastewater treatment, and a variety of social enterprises. By linking concern with the natural world to concern for human health and well-being, they challenge the environmental movement to broaden its vision of ecology.

Anthroposophy occupies a distinct ecological niche within the broader environmental movement. Its commitment to Goetheanism sets it apart from academic science; its understanding of social justice differs from that of the mainstream left; and its stress on the human role in cosmic evolution can create tension with Gaian critiques of anthropocentrism. The relationship between anthroposophical initiatives and the Anthroposophical Society also shapes the way it interacts with other forms of environmentalism. Yet the boundaries between anthroposophy and other impulses can be sites of transformative dialogue.

Anthroposophy, with its alchemical emphasis on the balancing of polarities, brings several gifts to the ongoing evolution of the environmental movement. These gifts include a cosmic holism that challenges us to attend to ever-widening circles of interconnection; a homeopathic model of social change that invites us to use subtle influences to heal the world; an appropriate anthropocentrism that allows us to experience ourselves as fully at home in the world; and a vision of planetary transmutation that can resist climate change while embracing biological and spiritual evolution.

This chapter looks systemically at the application of the ‘border sciences’ promoted by many Nazis, including astrology, World Ice Theory, and ‘biodynamic’ agriculture, between 1933 and 1941. In terms of astrology and parapsychology, biodynamic agriculture, and World Ice Theory, the regime's approach was often highly public. High-profile support for border science is evident in the regime employing biodynamic agriculture to prepare the athletics grounds for the 1936 Olympics or in Hitler and Himmler promoting World Ice Theory as official science despite the opposition of the entire academic establishment. Similarly, when it comes to anthroposophy's border scientific approach to ‘higher knowledge’ — whether in terms of radiesthesia, natural healing, or biodynamic agriculture — a remarkable number of Nazis expressed enthusiasm and support. During the Second World War, this border scientific approach to decision-making and policy helped facilitate projects both fantastical and monstrous.

This chapter begins with the Querelle du Peuplier, a debate between Maurice Barrès and André Gide, which gave voice to anti-Semitic, anti-intellectual, and anti-cosmopolitan tensions in France. From this example of French nationalism in its most reactionary form to the paganistic language used by the National Socialists for celebrating original autochthony, the appeal for a restored rootedness was everywhere at the beginning of the twentieth century. Simone Weil and Martin Heidegger take up the same tropes of rootedness and groundedness in order to propose solutions for an ailing Europe. Weil hoped to reverse the course toward abstraction while Heidegger sought a new groundedness in an age of burgeoning technology. Through a mystical logic of terroir, his arguments came to resemble those of the anthroposophists, who envisioned a new kind of integral personhood that would recontextualize humanity.

This chapter examines the pioneering green entrepreneurs in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who emerged in natural food and wind and solar energy. They were not conservationists but aimed to create for-profit businesses which were focused more on building a more sustainable future than on preserving the past. Many of them saw profits as a means to the end of remediating the ecological externalities of the conventional system. They are identifiable as precursors of contemporary green entrepreneurs, though their focus and mental framing reflected their own age, rather than ours. The chapter also considers the importance of the philosopher Rudolf Steiner, who offered a radical vision of sustainability. This period saw the foundations laid for today’s organic food, natural medicine, and renewable energy industries.