How to think globally by acting locally

Another LifeThere's fun to be had from some of the more bizarre omens of climate change - red admiral butterflies supping at snowdrops, for example (this from England). But with so many tree-rings to my bones, I warm to more usual signs of spring. Thus, while it's been nice to hear the song thrush all these weeks, I applauded the magpie that waited another month to fly across the hillside bearing a twig longer than itself. The frogs marked my birthday, as usual, with the first clump of spawn in the pond. And it was common daisies, not daffodils, that lifted their heads, so suddenly, radiantly white, to track the rebirth of the sun.

In Mayo there have always been "pet" days in February: a welcome instalment of trust in the unfolding of the year. And if seasons later came unstuck, as they often did, we had at least an ideal at the back of our minds against which to measure their errancy. Now, at the end of nature, we are learning existentialism: if it's comfortably warm - enjoy it, one day at a time.

The End of Naturewas the 1989 wake-up book by the American environmentalist Bill McKibben, its title catching the true insult of man-made climate change. For those attuned to nature as a source of magic and beauty, the loss of its autonomy is deeply wounding. Even the raindrops are now the wrong size. However, it's another gorgeous day, the air shimmering with light. And a new book from Bill McKibben leaves me feeling rather better.

"A generation ago," says the jacket, "many environmentalists advocated 'deep ecology' through which they sought to move beyond short-term, piecemeal reforms . . ."

Now McKibben offers Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Futureas a challenge to carbon-hungry capitalism. Deep Ecology, so radical in the 1970s, had two big ideas. First, that other species and their ecosystems should be granted intrinsic worth. Second, that Earth has too many bloody people. Some progress has been made in acknowledging the first. The second is still the gorilla in the middle of the room, getting fatter every day. The central heresy of Deep Economics (as engaging and bracing a read, I have to say, as any non-economist could wish) may still shock many Americans: "more", he insists, is no longer the same as "better".

He echoes the work of Mayo's Richard Douthwaite, whose seminal book in 1992 said it all: The Growth Illusion: How Economic Growth has Enriched the Few, Impoverished the Many and Endangered the Planet. He went on to write Short Circuit, about ways to build self-reliant local economies independent of global financial crises, and to launch Feasta, the foundation for the economics of sustainability - most immediately, how we live when all the oil's gone.

Like Douthwaite, McKibben searches the world for ways of doing things differently and better. The Cubans, forced into self-reliance by political isolation, grow much of their own food organically in thousands of pocket-sized urban market gardens - "the world's largest working model of a semi-sustainable agriculture".

As important - to follow the second thread of his book - might local improvisations of this kind become a happier way to live? Ever since we heard about the forested kingdom of Bhutan, whose rulers judge their success by the level of Gross National Happiness, the cash-register criteria of national economics have seemed increasingly inadequate. Environmental costs and benefits are already demanding space on the spreadsheet. Now, perhaps, economists will also have to engage with "the science of happiness".

"In general," says McKibben, "researchers report that money consistently buys happiness right up to about $10,000 per capita income, and after that point the correlation disappears."

In Ireland, many will think, an extra nought might not be out of place. But another source prompts him to add that "when the Irish were making a third as much as Americans they were reporting higher levels of satisfaction, as were the Swedes, the Danes and the Dutch."

To McKibben, as to Douthwaite, it is local economic organisation - local food, trade and services, entertainment, even local finance - that brings a more secure, more rewarding communal life. The Irish small town, with rural hinterland, might seem a good place to start on McKibben's "economics of neighbourliness".

Yet already the butchers, bakers and drapers, who used to spend their profits locally, are losing out to multi-national supermarket chains; local farmers find their produce priced as "loss-leaders"; local pubs lose their custom, along with community bonding, to supermarket six-packs for drinking in front of the television.

Authority conspires, too, closing post offices and local abattoirs and forcing absurd and costly hygiene conditions on nascent local enterprise. Country markets, selling local produce, are one way to fight back.

Deep Economy, published in the US in 2007 by Times Books