Today the market rules, and most people allow it to dictate the way they live. But there is also a significant tide of resistance to its supremacy, which is organised, global, and growing. Two of its representatives recently crossed four continents to visit communities and individuals who are ?living lightly?. DEFENDING some disparaging remarks about travellers, Jack Straw, the Home Secretary, later made matters worse: he affirmed that travellers were of two types ? law-breakers and genuine gypsies. Not only had he missed the point about travellers, most of whom are neither gypsies nor law-breakers but people who have turned their backs on what settled society has to offer them; he appeared oblivious of an entire culture of rejectionists of dominant consumer society.

Travellers are only a tiny subdivision of this new culture which has appeared all over the world ? including so-called developing countries whose path to development these rebels decline to follow. Everyone in this culture has rejected the promise, glamour and spurious security of consumer society in order to follow a vision of a better life ? and most have grown happier.

Looking for life beyond the supermarket, we travelled for three years among people who belong to this embryonic post-consumer society which doesn?t yet have a name. We call it the culture of living lightly ? borrowing the old Green slogan of living lightly on the earth. In Europe, the United States, Australia and Japan, we found individuals and communities quite content to lower their standard of living in return for a higher quality of life, convinced they have found a more satisfying and sustainable lifestyle for the new millennium.

How can we speak of living lightly in the Third World, where people are poor? In India we found many activists disillusioned with a global system which has transformed farming into an industry too costly for poorer farmers, driving them into cities ill-equipped to receive them and depriving the locals of the food they used to have. Ulhas Gore, an activist who gave up a well-paid city job to work in the villages, told us that he and his friends come from a mixed Marxist-Gandhian tradition. Not content with protesting against gigantic dams like the Narmada which flood poor people?s homes and mainly benefit the rich, Gore and his friends are building small dams and installing village systems for sharing the water and boosting local self-reliance.

In the rich world, people already living in the post-consumer society include individual families like Daniel and Suzanne Cooper and their three children, who produce over 85 per cent of their food and energy needs on their farm in north Wales. The Coopers get their power from the sun and wind, their water from the stream and spiritual satisfaction from the trees they have planted.

In South Australia we spent time with the Donald family, who bought a tract of degraded and eroded cattle country abandoned by ranchers who should never have farmed it in the first place, and have devoted their lives to bringing back wildlife, especially wombats who are shy and nocturnal and look like miniature bears.

Families like the Coopers and the Donalds are extreme in their rejection of conventional values. Others have stepped more cautiously into the new culture. Co-housing, a way of living that began in Denmark and is spreading in the United States, is a system of clustering homes round a common, car-free space where children are safe, food can be grown, and a common house offers community meals as often as the members want. Lifestyle movements include the downshifters in the Voluntary Simplicity Movement, which has followers all over United States. In Seattle we found them taking courses in opting out and living with less. The cardinal rule is: buy what you need and don?t go shopping.

Everyone in this post-consumer culture is concerned with better food and sustainable farming. Organic Roundabout, one of the fastest-growing businesses in the West Midlands, distributes boxes of organic vegetables. The food is bought from a farmers? co-operative, the members live in a housing co-operative and their company is also a co-operative ? a favourite model for post-consumers. Community-supported agriculture flourishes in the United States and Germany and is starting in Britain. Customers pay in advance for a share in the coming season?s crop and then collect their organic veggies every week. They are personally involved with the farm that grows some of the food they eat.

One of the most fruitful innovations in this new society is Permaculture, a design system for living and farming in harmony with nature, originating in Australia and now taught and practised all over the world. It is the opposite of factory farming, yet so productive that a family could live on the produce of an average-sized urban garden. There is no miracle here: an acre which is diversified, needs no costly inputs, builds up its soil year by year instead of degrading it with chemicals, and fills many family needs at once is obviously more productive than an acre with a single crop depending on costly inputs.

Living lightly is not just rural. Many success stories of post-consumerism are in towns and cities ? where by the year 2020 over half of humanity will live. A community of mild-mannered anarchists in Utrecht, Holland, have lived and worked for many years in a complex of housing and business co-operatives called the VAKgroep ? a social and financial success. But not only anarchists make good co-operatives. In Maleny, a small town in Queensland, you can find a model of post-consumer conviviality, with co-operatives giving loans, training people for jobs, issuing local money, selling organic food, recycling waste and running a popular bar and restaurant.

More thoroughgoing radicals live in communities, spiritual or profane, dedicated to a sustainable lifestyle and post-shopping values. Auroville, in south India, has 1,200 members of 31 nationalities, aiming to accelerate evolution by raising human consciousness. Meanwhile the members have planted more than two million trees and greened a parched, degraded landscape. In the United States, there are more than 500 entries in the Directory of Intentional Communities. In Britain 68 communities, including 24 in towns and cities, are listed in the handbook Diggers and Dreamers.

Western educated people are not normally brought up to share. Teaching youngsters to co-operate rather than compete, and to share the values of a new paradigm, is the task of schools and colleges like Brockwood Park, the Krishnamurti school in Hampshire, and Schumacher College in Devon. Typically, pupils and students cook their own dinners, clean up the premises and work in the vegetable garden.

While differing widely in the way they live and the solutions they offer, living lightly people all agree with one proposition: that the global consumer economy, which appears to confer so many blessings on us all, creates more losers than winners. It lowers the quality of life for almost everyone on earth ? even those whose standard of living it enhances. In rich countries, an underclass of the underpaid or unemployed has reappeared, while many people who earn enough are insecure in their jobs and have to work harder and harder to keep up. In the South, globalisation has enriched minorities and made many millions of poor people still poorer.

The society of Coca-Cola and Macdonald?s destroys cultures and degrades the environment to the point where it threatens human survival. Poor people need local land to produce food for themselves, not exports for distant supermarkets. The global economy cuts down the trees, pollutes the rivers and factory-trawls the fish on which the poor depend.

The cheap food we enjoy in our supermarkets is not cheap when we add up the true cost to people in the South involved in its production, or the waste and pollution caused by the packaging and transport of the goods. Whatever statistic you choose, the conclusion you reach is inescapable: we are harming, perhaps destroying, our planet. The average item of food sold in the United States has travelled 2,080 km. In Britain almost 30 per cent of children suffer from asthma at some stage during their childhood, and traffic fumes hasten the death of 24,000 people a year.

Moreover, the deliberate and systematic globalisation of trade and investment is unsustainable: it has been calculated that several planets the size of Earth would be needed to realise its implied promise that some day everyone will live in Western-style affluence. A market from which nobody can hide reduces all values to those of the consumer society. This is a new global empire, sustained by corporate vested interests more powerful than any previous one.

The resistance to this hegemony exists at grassroots level. Signposts have been put up pointing to a society which will encourage locally-based economies, reducing the extravagant transport of people and goods, offering healthier and tastier food and more work as essential local wants are fulfilled. Complementary local currencies called LETS (Local Exchange and Trading Systems), already flourishing in many cities in Britain and around the world, will sustain an informal economy. More goods will be made locally and built to be repaired rather than replaced.

Living lightly people are the new radicals ? the ones that matter now that the Left, the Right and the Third Way all agree that the unfettered global economy is the only game in town. To revive local economies implies some degree of protectionism. But this would not resemble the protectionism of the last century which favoured a minority of rich farmers and industrialists: it would benefit most people in North and South.

Living lightly is a pioneering movement: you have to be tough and resourceful and co-operate. This is a stern, prophetic culture, denouncing corrupted values, predicting that the global economy will collapse and be replaced by the new paradigm.

The two of us hope that there will not be a collapse, but a dual society in which the official economy will continue, enriching its favourites and impoverishing its victims while allowing an alternative culture to become an alternative economy. The two cultures must eventually co-operate because each has benefits to offer the other. In the end the better culture will win. Meanwhile, most of us in our hearts will be somewhere in between the two.

Our travels have changed us. We made friends in four continents whose values we share. In spite of their diversity they are all part of a single community ? linked on a psychological level by shared values and ideas, on an intellectual level by a whole library of books, on a physical level by courses and conferences, and on a virtual-reality level through e-mail and the Internet.

In places as different as the communal village at the Farm in Tennessee, or the New Age community at Findhorn in Scotland, or the alternative school called Virtual High in Vancouver, the kids enchanted us. Growing up dangerously in the audacity of questioning conventional values, yet securely in belonging to a close community, these young people have become citizens of a new culture.

Are these experiments in living lightly successful? The criteria are complex. None has fully achieved self-sufficiency or the environmental sustainability of a true eco-village ? more often through shortage of funds than lack of will or know-how. None has won freedom from worry about money, without which the good life is no longer possible. None can be sure that their children, when old enough to make their choices, will accept their parents? priorities. None has found a reliable solution to the strains and conflicts of human interaction (in several communities we found a high turnover in sexual partnerships). Mixed in among the strong idealists and hard-working achievers we found fragile people, casualties of mainstream society who have come to seek refuge. The communities we saw were well able to cope with misfits ? and found an added satisfaction in the knowledge that the strong were helping the weak.

The experiments are successful because they show that alternatives to the mainstream are practicable. They are success- ful because most people taking part are fulfilled and contented most of the time.

In our new friends? rejection of mainstream values and practices, we did not find a rigid fundamentalism: indeed, they are moderates: they do not argue against technology, or industry, or international trade, but only against the excess and misuse of these benefits. Machines to ease our toil, cure our ailments, travel or study are fine with them; the problem arises when technology (or rather its owners) take us over. We have seen this happen in industrial agriculture, transforming farmers into agents of the corporations which sell them costly and dangerous chemicals, and machines and patented seeds without which they can no longer survive. De-skilling and de-valuing are at work in the relentless concentration of commerce and industry and the globalisation of world trade.

WE hope that certain notions will become officially respectable: that foreign trade is good but excessive foreign trade is bad; that farming with tools and with science is good but transforming farming into a global industry is bad; economic development in the South is good, but only if it proceeds from the village up, not from the global corporations down. We hope that an education system will be authorised that promotes self-reliance (cooking school dinner, cleaning up the premises and growing vegetables, for a start) and co-operation in learning and playing instead of competition. To live lightly does not imply rejecting the marvels of our times, but using them with care. As the poet Gary Synder remarks, the best things in life are not things. Unlike Jack Straw?s travellers, the metaphorical travellers of today and tomorrow are making a risky journey away from the prevailing consumer culture towards a more humane one. If they arrive safely in the course of the next millennium, we will all be beneficiaries.

? Walter Schwarz was the Guardian?s Religious Affairs Correspondent. Dorothy Schwarz, author of short stories, teaches creative writing. Their book Living Lightly ? travels in post-consumer society is published by Jon Carpenter at ?15.

Back to homepage