many key design relationships are often dramatically expressed in the built-environment and the building industry. In my earlier book, Designing the Green Economy (Milani, 2000), I described how we are in the midst of a major historical transition. This makes it ever more imperative that we consider the building industry in the context of the economy as a whole. For this reason, I will provide an overview of green economic change, building on the principles outlined in my earlier book, with the building industry as a kind of case study of ecological transformation. In this sense, this work takes a step beyond Designing the Green Economy, which surveyed key economic sectors in a very general way. In this thesis, I have the opportunity to look at how the principles of green economic development apply to a particular industryan industry which nevertheless involves various sectors of the economy. I will look at the evaluation, production, consumption, recycling and regulation of building materials, in ways that point to possibilities for community development. My belief is that this study should be useful not just for those involved in building, but for anyone interested in how fundamental social change can take place. In my previous book, I argued that such change requires a large vision of what green production-consumption should be, and the systematic creation of enterprises that gradually take us closer to those ideals. The attempt here is to define that vision for building while calling attention to efforts already underway to realize aspects of this vision. I will look at materials use as a system, echoing the insight of ecologist Barry Commoner (Geiser, 2001, p. xi) that our existing economys destructiveness (both environmental and social) arises not primarily from a failure of design, but from a