Sustainability 2.0: The Rise of a New Living in a Smart Village

What if you could live in a house where every single attribute is optimized for your well-being? Where by each single day that passes, you in fact help to restore our planet, only by living in your house. ______________ This is something that James Ehrlich, a faculty member at Stanford, Singularity University and senior fellow at NASA Ames Research Center, set out as his mission to build. Sustainability is obsolete. It is too late to sustain our planet - we need to restore our planet. This is what regenerative living means - living in a way to not only sustain our surrounding but to restore it. An ecovillage is designed in such a way that we live in tune with nature and restore our planet. This is no longer a utopia but is in fact being built across the world. This is the rise of the new ecovillage movement, or so-called "smart villages." James Ehrlich started the Regen Villages research initiative at Stanford in 2012, which in 2016 turned into an impact spin-off company called Regen Villages, to realize the future of living in regenerative and self-sustaining neighborhoods. His work has been influential - in fact, he has worked on regenerative infrastructure under the Obama White House administration. He is essentially building a B2B SaaS tool, which enables architects to build and run ecovillages in a resource-efficient way - or a “Tesla for ecovillages.” With the tap of a finger, you can upgrade your ecovillage operating system with the latest software improvements. Episode learnings: - What regenerative living means - What an ecovillage is and what life in an eco-village could look like - How we can save our planet by living in a regenerative way - What is fueling this trend ___________________________________ James Ehrlich has an impressive resume. On top of all the achievements mentioned above, he started his career within lighting design working with world-famous artists such as Tina Turner and Joe Jackson. He then transitioned into video game design, followed by a career in television. He produced a TV series called the Organic Living and Hippy Gourmet, watched by over 35 million homes per week, and authored a best selling cooking book to accompany the TV series. All of this background brought him to Regen Villages research initiative, marrying technology, nature and storytelling to create a better future for the younger generation.