block healthy adaptation or else force change that is too rapid. It is beyond the scope of this thesis to fully deal with many of these questions of ownership and stewardship, but I must at least briefly itemize some of these factors, as they pertain to buildings, since they do have an influence on materials consumption: The power of money and interest devalues or discounts the future, in effect presuming that people today have the right to the use of all future resources. It makes economic sense to make money on land and resources now, even irreplaceable ones, so that interest can accumulate. This applies to materials and resourceslike virgin forests; but it also applies to buildingsmost dramatically in the case of historical buildings. Underlying moneys perverse priorities, of course, is a pervasive undervaluing of both nature and community. In capitalism, time is money, but perhaps even worse, money controls time. An example is the interest on construction loans to developers and builders that encourages haste, poor quality and a distorted emphasis on externals. This socalled time value of money obscures and destroys what urbanist Jane Jacobs called use-value of time. Beside the obvious destruction of quality of life by the development industry, the quest for short-term profit usually makes no medium-term sense, even in narrow monetary terms. As Jacobs writes, in an intelligent economy time makes the high building costs of one generation the bargains of a following generation. Speculation and short-term profit destroy these bargains. Jacobs and Brand point out that premature destruction of the past can limit the futurein that older buildings can actually be more freeing to users