The Still-Hopeful Future Of Sustainability

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The motto in many areas outside Europe and some affiliated nations in 2025 seems to be: We only have to wait until technology no longer causes pollution or even makes everything so clean that it is okay, which will inevitably happen sooner or later due to the inherent laws of auto-evolution of technology. Yet, in the meantime, we don't have to do without anything and certainly not reduce growth.

The consequence: growth stabilization or“degrowth” discussions, in essence, currently only exist in Europe, home to only 5-7% of the world's population, and hardly anywhere else in serious and systemic ways.

Yet also in the EU, resistance against“strong” sustainability pathways is growing with the politically conservative shift that is taking place in many European countries. Some progressive observers are therefore worriedly asking themselves: Was the sustainability idea perhaps too ambitious for our time? And is it now coming to an end with Donald Trump – or at least experiencing a historical break from which it could take years to recover?

However, on closer inspection, these fears are due to rather simplistic, linear ideas of development and time – an approach that should actually have been obsolete for a long time. Because we know by now that ideas have risen in history; they then materialized in a certain period up to a certain form and peak, which was always context- and time-dependent.

And sooner or later, after this period, they had to reach a limit, after which they were either relativized, transformed into something else, or indeed displaced or even seemingly destroyed by opposing forces when the pendulum swings to the“other side”, which always did and does in historical cycles.

These cycles, in essence, correspond to those“hermeneutical circles” that modern philosophy describes as creative spirals consisting of the interplay between opposites.

For some pessimists, within such pendulum movements, ideas appear as a historical phase that only lasts for a while and then disappears to make way for other ideas. In reality, however, the rise and fall of ideas occur in recurring cycles. It is a kind of circular movement of death and rebirth, figuratively speaking.

Many ideas in history that were born out of a high degree of maturity of their time, like sustainability, can have their period in which they have a strong effect. Then they can have to temporarily take a back seat, or even fail indefinitely.

In the first case, these ideas have to“overwinter,” which they usually do on their own by retreating into niches or below the surface of public debate and prominence. Later, after the overwintering phase, they may return – mostly if they were not superficial but reflected the substance of historical evolution and development.

This has always been the case with the more profound zeitgeist ideas. Their representatives, for example, artists, often rose to fame and were traded at high prices, only to be forgotten for decades in the following epoch and fall in price – only to be rediscovered in the subsequent era and rise again.

The most interesting thing about this implicit law of circular decline and resurgence is that ideas disappear or are pushed into the background, but when they come back, they usually have become much stronger than they were, although they often have changed form or phrasing.

When ideas come back, they usually also last longer and have greater stability than during their original rise. That is, after the overwintering phase, the resurrection phase can make ideas even more influential, although often more differentiated and“wise” than they were in the first place.

It is exactly for these reasons that history must be considered as something superhuman that is made by humans, which is where its creative paradox lies. Those ideas that are historically“defeated” by superhuman laws of alternation, when they do come back – and nobody knows beforehand if, how and when exactly this occurs – often do so after metamorphoses and are therefore much more difficult to completely defeat again.

Ideas, one could summarize, basically must go through death and resurrection, like nature in the course of the tides, to reach their destiny. It could be assumed that this is exactly what is happening – or will happen – with the sustainability idea.

The good thing about its temporary trimming could be that its ideological appropriation – the transformation of an idea into an ideology that answers everything and that one is no longer allowed to contradict, which was at least temporarily the case in Europe – is reduced.

Then the sustainability idea can restore itself more freely and with more participants: namely as the original power of something right that needs no moralization and no ethical formalization to be right because it is felt, sensed and supported by ordinary people with emphasis simply because it makes sense.

The recent shift in the US towards a – presumably also only temporary – anti-sustainability stance cannot change that fact. And neither can the people who are driving opposition forward, like some currently prominent politicians steering their nations away from the path-breaking sustainability pacts of 2015 (SDGs), 2016 (Paris Agreement) and 2024 (United Nations Pact for the Future).

In our era, politics is always the balance between the individual moral feeling regarding a righteous livelihood and the collective formalization of a compromise between different ideas about it, a social pact called“democracy.”

If today there are politicians in the White House – and elsewhere – who continue to underscore at any occasion that they are nothing more than just“dealmakers,” they thereby admit that they have nothing to do with the effort to integrate values with serving the general public, of which democracy consists.

It is humanly foreseeable that such an attitude against the very substance of politics consciously will be replaced by“pure business logic”, as for example Donald Trump displayed in his now (in)famous public White House conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in February 2025, cannot last.

What does all this mean if we try to sum up the teachings? It means ideas can only apply and work cyclically – even if they are right and historically at the time. If we are convinced that the sustainability idea was and remains right to achieve a better world, we should also come to the conviction that this idea will be resurrected with transformed appearance and strength in the coming years, as history never stops but continues to develop, unfold and ramify.