In this sense, this evolved eco-industrial thinking parallels the ideas of architect Christopher Alexander (1979; 1987) who argues for every act of building to be seen as an act of repair of patterns that all people, buildings, businesses, and communities are already embedded within. The vision and principles, however, are crucial in making sure that incremental change does actually heal bad patterns, and not simply amount to adaptive co-optation that reinforces the status quo on another level. In the building industry, I feel the greatest untapped potential for materials transformation begins with green market creation though various kinds of cooperative strategies using life-cycle information. My personal involvement in such an initiative, described in Chapter VI, convinced me that the very organization of information, coupled with community outreach through building retrofit programmes, is a powerful draw to the involvement of independent retailers of building materials. Having the retailers on side would seem to be an even easier task today because of the growth of Green Building Councils and building assessment systems like LEED. Governments, for their part, are significant players in LEED, with many public buildings, from municipal to federal level, now being certified. Information can indeed be power, if combined with other complimentary cooperative efforts like that of the community retrofit programmes, green power initiatives, municipal waste reduction efforts, building code reform, health and building sickness remediation, etc. A crucial link for success is that between market initiatives and production. In Alameda County California, efforts to reduce the municipal waste stream have been linked with efforts to create eco-industrial parks to produce products from diverted waste materials (Mara, 2003). Green market creation initiatives need to be coupled with