Imagine a deep ecological thinker that lives in the breathtaking Spanish Pyrenees in a 700 year old hand-built house that captures all of its own energy from the sun, harvests all the water it needs from the rain, and invites nature into the heart of the home.

That is Emmanuel Pauwels.

Emmanuel is a Regenerative Practitioner through and through. From the way that he designs buildings to the regenerative leadership he instills in Green Living Projects, a European-based consultancy that he founded in 2009. Emmanuel is part soothsayer, part philosopher and on this interview helps to expand our awareness of how we can evolve not just real estate design and construction of individual home sites, but the entire development process so that the built environment can enable all life on this planet to co-evolve.

By providing frameworks like the Five Capitals, Emmanuel uses his real life experience at his home Cal Guerxo to talk about how all forms of capital (natural, social, physical, financial, and human) need a return. He lets constraints guide the creativity and showcases how capital can be interchanged to continue to propel a project forward.

If you are looking for ways to help move beyond the sustainability paradigm of doing less bad, Emmanuel Pauwels is someone that must be on your radar.

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