composite wood; vinyl wallcoverings; ceiling tile; insulation; fireproofing; as well as cleaning systems. The response to the IAQ crisis has been the rise of a virtual industry devoted to establishing and maintaining safe indoor environments. It includes engineers, health and building consultants, builders, architects, regulators, researchers, product designers, subcontractors and many more. Of particular note is a special class of building devoted to the environmentally hypersensitivepeople who react to even minute amounts of manmade chemicals, and even many aromatic natural substances (like softwood resins). Special research, testing and consulting is necessary to provide homes which completely isolate them from threatening substances and hopefully allow their immune systems to strengthen. In Canada, Canada Mortgage and Housing (CMHC) has taken a leading role in commissioning research in this area and compiling directories of materials approved for the hypersensitive (Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), 1997). The crown corporation has also moved strongly to encourage healthy housing for the general population (Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), 2003), including sponsoring a housing design competition that resulted eventually in the building of Torontos Healthy House, an off-the-grid advanced eco-house (Priesnitz, 1997; Rousseau & Wasley, 1997, p. 108-119). Because my focus is the detoxification of building materials at source, I will not attempt to survey the whole of the healthy building movement, most of which is adaptive, rather than transformative. That is, it is concerned with helping people create healthy living conditions in a toxic worldnot primarily how to detoxify production. Most of the literature on healthy building, for example, is pragmatically focusedand