What is Sustainable Development?

Why have we not been able to figure out exactly what sustainable development is? It seems like a simple enough task, to define this term, this goal that we should be striving for. It seems that the problem comes from the governments, businesses, and other organizations that don’t want to be on the wrong side of that definition once we finally figure it out.
The definition that Dryzek gives seems to be a satisfactory one, saying, “sustainable development is a process of change in which the exploitation of resources, the direction of investments, the orientation of technological development, and institutional change are all in harmony an enhance both current and future potential to meet human needs and aspirations,” (145). It’s that last statement that seems to be troublesome “enhance both current and future potential to meet human needs and aspirations.” Depending on what a government, business, or organization views as what these human needs and aspirations are, their interpretation of sustainable development changes drastically.
Just as Speth puts it “increasingly, pollution comes not from something going wrong but from normal life,” (88). If our society is ever to become sustainable, we must first create a standard for what is considered to be sustainable development. The Environmental Sustainability Index developed in Northern Europe is the first step in holding countries accountable for their destructive development. Certainly in this country and in many others we are going to need to revamp our industries and find new ways to maintain the lifestyle that affluent nations seems to need. If we do not lead by example, the rest of the world’s developing nations will follow our same unsustainable path and we will exhaust our world at an alarming rate.