Besides the practical influence of construction on my concern with materials, there has also been an intellectual and political thread, expressed in my study and writing on green political-economy. All roadsprofessional, construction, political, economic and environmental, activist and intellectualhave led to Rome, i.e. to materials, as a key to economic change today. Since the mid-seventies, ecology has played an ever-greater role in my political and economic thinking. By the nineties, I had become aware that the most crucial distinction between industrial and postindustrial development is expressed in their respective relationship to materials and human creativity. That is, industrial development has been essentially a phase of quantitative or material development: what I call thing-production. By contrast, postindustrialism suggests unrealized but latent potentials for qualitative or cultural developmentpost-materialist development, or people-production. When these potentials emerge, material things remain vital concerns, but material production can no longer be an end in itselfit must become simply means to the end of satisfying real need. This is the only way we can survive in a finite world, and it is the only way the new forms of eco-efficiency (which are premised on an end-use approach) can be tapped. Such a reversal of means and ends is to a large extent possible because the industrialization of culture has changed not just the outputs, but the inputs of production. In contrast to 19th century industrialism, the key factors of production are no longer physical capital and routine labour, but human creativity and ingenuity. My previous book makes this argument in more detail, and I will elaborate more later in this chapter. Here I want only to provide some personal context that illustrates my concern with materials. I want to make clear that this work is intended to contribute