The desire to build and maintain environmentally safe communities with neighborhood resources prompted Neil Seldman and two partners to create the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) in 1974. Today the Washington, D.C.-based ILSR has a national reach and acts as a consultant for communities interested in smart, environmentally sound development.

With the goal of insulating local communities from national market vagaries, the ILSR helps start-up companies tap local sources of energy, labor, building materials, food, and real estate to build self-sustaining neighborhoods. “We believe in the international trade of ideas, not materials,” says Seldman, ILSR president.

Two ILSR projects include Deconstruction—the business of reusing building materials—and the Healthy Building Network—a coalition of building professionals and environmentalists who identify hazardous building materials and suggest cost-effective, environmentally friendly alternatives. Bill Walsh, national coordinator of the program, switched from pushing for bans on pesticides to approaching the same issues from a building materials perspective when he founded the network two years ago. “It changed everything,” he says.

The Healthy Building Network successfully campaigned in 2001 to ban the use of arsenic-treated wood on playgrounds. Educating government agencies about the risks of arsenic, which comes off on kids’ hands, resulted in agreements from pressed wood manufacturers to switch to arsenic-free wood by 2003. “Most customers had no idea they were using arsenic in children’s playgrounds,” explains Walsh.