The Living Lightly people have grown happier. They have found a better model for living at this turn of the century - a time when a handful of multinational companies have grown more powerful than governments, the gap between the rich and the poor widens year by year, and the competitive demands of an endlessly expanding global economy have come to rule our lives.

We sought and found a growing global counter-culture of people convinced that the global economy is not a blessing but a disaster - and who have found a better model for the 21^st Century.

We evaluated failure as well as success and we ended up more hopeful for the future. We are convinced after our journeys that people would be happier in a thriving local economy, providing basic food and livelihood for all, than the global one which changes food into a commodity, destroys jobs, devalues cultures and devastates the human and natural environment.

Our itinerary for LIVING LIGHTLY included:

1. More or less radical lifestyles.

Voluntary Simplicity in Seattle, USA, downshifting in UK, Cohousing in the USA, sustainable use of land at Tinkers Bubble (Somerset,UK) and Pure Genius (London); self-sufficiency in North Wales and saving the wombat in Australia.

2. Better farms, better food.

The vegan and vegetarian arguments; Plants for a Future and Keveral Organic Farm (Cornwall, UK). Community-supported agriculture in New England USA, Crystal Waters, the world’s first Permaculture village in Australia.

3. Some answers to globalisation.

The realities of the global economy and the way it is being challenged in India with a "people’s dam" (a small one). Urban self-sufficiency and co-operative living in Tokyo, Bombay, Birmingham (UK), Utrecht (Holland) and Maleny (Australia).

4. Living in Community.

We live and work at The Farm in Tennessee, Findhorn in Scotland and Auroville in India .

5. Connections.

The schools we visited include Virtual High in Vancouver,Canada and, in UK, Brockwood Park, The Small School and Schumacher College.

After looking at the role of the Internet in Living Lightly culture, we draw conclusions from our travels.

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More and more people experience the world as becoming uglier, dirtier, less healthy and less just. In rich countries, people appear divided into those who work too hard to enjoy their prosperity, those who work, full-time or part-time, for pitifully low wages - and those who have no jobs at all. As a result, more individuals are becoming interested in alternatives.

How can we speak of ‘living lightly’ in the Third World, where most people are poor? In India we found boundless enthusiasm for Western-style comfort and affluence, and we found people resentful that well-off travellers from a rich country should tell them not to become rich.

They are right. You can’t tell someone who wants a refrigerator that they can manage with an ice-box, particularly not when you’ve always had a fridge yourself. But we found that here, too, individuals and groups had begun to question the benefits of the global economy and of so-called economic development.

Since the end of the second world war, millions of rural people who were poor by industrial standards but led viable lives have become destitute, as the forests which nourished them for centuries are cut down, water supplies are drained off for industrial use or polluted, fish stocks are depleted by mechanised foreign ships, homes and lands are drowned by a gigantic new dam.

‘Development’ of this kind forces farmers off their land into cities where neither sufficient work nor adequate infrastructure awaits them. As a result, there are people in the South (as we prefer to call the Third World) who are experimenting with different approaches to development. In tune with the ideas of the Living Lightly culture in the North, they are seeking home-grown solutions.

In India we visited pioneers with their own vision of what ‘development’ should mean. Not content with protesting against large dams which tend to benefit the rich, they were building small dams. We found scientists, engineers and social activists introducing equitable water distribution and organic farming into groups of villages. They were not trying to return to a primitive past; they want technology to serve the needs of living beings and of the planet.

In North and South, the pioneers in this book are changing themselves. They act on the micro-level, at the grass roots. Most are practical people; some are technological wizards who invent sustainable solutions for living better with less, and who network with each other across the world by e-mail and through the Internet. They already belong to the twenty-first century.

They hope that the tiny islands of better living which they inhabit will provide examples which will eventually supplant the norms of unfettered global capitalism which rule us today. Their hope is not in revolution but in persuasion by example.

Small groups of Living Lightly people are now part of an articulate and increasingly purposeful global culture which promotes values that run counter to those of the mainstream. We found such groups in the USA, Europe, Australia, India and Japan, with the same aims, the same ideology - and using a similar vocabulary to describe it.

The words that matter are empowerment, community, sustainability, consciousness (their word for a new awareness), and energy (their word for the spiritual power of group feeling, not sources of mechanical power).

In different continents, in North and South, they envisage and practise similar solutions: eco-villages (self-reliant and convivial communities), permaculture (a more productive and sustainable way of organising homes and gardens), CSA (community-supported agriculture), LETS (trading with a local currency), co-housing (living in your own home while sharing basic facilities), and downshifting (voluntary simplicity). They rarely talk about the environment, which they often see as a luxury protected by privileged people for their own enjoyment: they are more interested in a world which allows everyone a good life.

The Living Lightly people hold values which are based on a conviction that life has meaning beyond the visible and measurable. Such perennial values continue to enjoin reverence for all life, human and non-human, and therefore exclude the sort of exploitation practised in the deforestation of the Amazon region, in a motorway destroying a beauty spot, and in other profit-making exploits in the name of development.

Such values reinstate notions of community, beauty in architecture, local self-reliance and living in a bioregional economy.

Living Lightly pioneers believe that the emerging global market is in effect a new world empire worshipping false gods of consumerism and greed. They think the empire will eventually disintegrate, as others have. In anticipation of that collapse, islands of refuge must be prepared.

Whether a world-wide financial crash or an ecological catastrophe happens or not, these experiments will serve as beacons lighting a route to the next century. The techniques of sustainable living will have been perfected and tested in readiness for a time when consumption has been uncoupled from greed and returned to its primary purpose of fulfilling need.

Warnings of catastrophe can be exaggerated. Bigots and fundamentalists also talk about islands of refuge against Armageddon. But in the past a few lonely prophets of doom were proved right. The moral prophets of the Old Testament warned that a society with no communal morality was doomed, and so it proved. The new Green prophets aren’t that different. Voices like Wendell Berry’s or Gary Snyder’s in the USA or John Seymour’s in Britain are part of an unbroken tradition of prophetic writing. And their prophecies are listened to and validated by movements in ideas, linked world-wide on the Internet. There is a U-turn in what progress means.

We are less brave and adventurous than the Living Lightly pioneers, but like many others in the North we yearn for re-involvement in community, for fresh, wholesome local food and for a less destructive lifestyle. As we see urban households shrinking, children degenerating into a spiral of crime and rows of grannies banished to old-age homes, we want to rediscover, or re-invent, the extended family which is still the norm in much of the South.

Each chapter describes a different set of experiences - except Chapter 8 in which we set out the case against the global consumer economy, and Chapter 17, in which we reflect on the role of computers and the Internet in a Living Lightly context . Criticism of the global economy forms the underlying theme of our book, the viewpoint shared by the people we write about and the justification for the changes in lifestyle which they have made.

Can these ‘islands of success’ survive? Are they replicable for the rest of us? These are the questions we were asking ourselves on our travels. Come with us on our journey ...