Gaviotas excerpt

On development:

While his polyglot father translated, Paolo [Lugari, creator of Gaviotas] concentrated as the tall priest [Lebret] posed a Socratic question to the others over the dessert brandy. "How," he asked, "can we define development?"
"By the amount of paved kilometers of road per citizen," suggested Lugari's uncle, Tomas Castrillon, then Colombia's Minister of Public Works. Lebret shook his head.
"By the number of hospital beds per capita," said the Minister of Health. No again.
Equally incorrect, evidently, were the treasury minister, who offered a ratio of gross domestic product divided by the population, and a director of Banco de la Republica, who proposed calculating the percentage of total wealth that a given society had invested in infrastructure.
"Development," Lebret finally told them, "means making people happy." Eyes snapped toward him. "Before you spend your money on roads and factories, you should first be sure that those are what your citizens really need."

Gaviotas is a wonderful book by Alan Weisman about a lifelong sustainable development project in Colombia involving many people, many auspicious ideas, with implications for the country and the world. I highly recommended it - an easy-to-read nonfiction book! It might even give you the urge to head out somewhere really remote and rough it like this bunch of innovators.