Nature could thrive in cyberspace

A blue haze of forget-me-not has spread across the vegetables, blurring the beetroot and wreathing the beans. Each flower is scarcely one millimetre across, which marks it out as the wild and weedy Myosotis, nearer the blue of a summer sky than the darker, smarter hues bred for garden rockeries and bank window-boxes.

I don't begrudge forget-me-not the margins of my vegetable beds, or a few sentences of thought. It is both a visual delight and part of a precious fabric of time and place. Like everything else on the acre, it helps keep me rooted in the earth and its seasons.

There are other realities, I know, some far too virtual for my taste. Those ads on television for mobile phones that link to the Internet have a marvellous surrealism, like Dali's floppy watches. They promise a non-stop lottery of change updated in blips of a button, a constant revision of one's present condition, a life that never quite arrives.

Caught up in the euphoria of such relentless anticipation, it must be hard to make sense of the rural retreat that some of us opted for a couple of decades ago. "Settlers" was one thing we were called, which implied a kind of stasis. And indeed, whatever chaotic change in skills and lifestyle our new situation demanded, there was, suddenly, a solid earth under our feet and an unalarmed, negotiable silence all around.

Now that everyone can find organic carrots to eat, that particular road to Eden has become somewhat overgrown and travelled by an even more deliberate few. But with the Celtic Tiger scarcely in its stride, the chorus of regret about stress, greed, globalisation, lost quality of life, rings out from the Pale and will not be long spreading. The hunger for alternatives to metropolitan complexity, consumption and frustration is on the prowl again.

One new compromise on offer appears to be something called "loser chic", a term borrowed, appropriately, from America, and so glib that few of its actual practitioners would sign up to it. At its heart is making choices and deciding, at some point before it's too late, that less can mean more: a measured opting out from the norms of company culture and success. It may bring a saner, more fulfilling, family lifestyle and environment, or simply freedom to harness oneself to some more creative destiny. Either way, it usually means scraping by on a lot less than 40K a year.

None of this is new, just a re-run in Ireland of the stress and self-scrutiny inseparable from experiencing capitalism at full belt. But it could have some interesting consequences for a green counter-culture keen to try out its systems for sustainable ways to live. The very fact of thinking in systems (as, of course, nature itself does) should have a strongly subversive appeal among lively-minded cyberfreaks.

For my generation of homesteaders, an intellectual mecca was the Centre for Alternative Technology, founded on a wasteland of rock and slate-dust at Machynnleth in Wales. Its spinning windmills, solar panels, straw-bale buildings and composted gardens have made their point for 25 years of demonstration and experiment. Just now, they are perfecting the use of Welsh wool as cavity wall insulation (which you may learn from a visit to www.cat.org.uk, a website also offering "virtual tours" of the centre).

CAT is no green Utopia, but a brave step in that direction. Its ideas have found their way into scores of eco-villages across the globe - human settlements designed to build community in ways that work with nature, using energy efficiently and minimising waste.

Some are very consciously spiritual in tone, such as Scotland's widely-known Findhorn Foundation, some are still fairly rudimentary communes ("good work, no television, consensual decision-making"). Still others are highly-developed working communities of sophisticated (but low-energy) design and set in leafy, food-producing landscapes.

ECO-villages have come late to Ireland. The first is under construction on the border at Burdautien, just outside Clones in Co Monaghan, where The Ark training centre has been providing courses in permaculture (the design of highly productive "edible ecosystems"), along with straw-bale building, reed-bed sewage ponds and how to make fuel for your diesel engine from used cooking oil.

Burdautien's thatched straw-bale and cob houses have the charm of Hobbit dwellings and the first families have already moved in (learn more about the project at www.ecovillages.org/ireland/burdautien).

There are other, similar projects in prospect in Kerry and west Cork, but nothing, perhaps, to match the ambition of The Village, "a democratic, ecological and community-centred housing company" of charitable status based in Dublin. It is looking for a 100-acre rural site within minutes on to create a village of 40 to 50 houses, a community building and enterprise centre, all to be "a model of sustainable living".

With a final capitalisation of £1.2 million in mind, this does not sound much like a straw-bale enterprise: more, perhaps, like a rural campus on the model of the "green" building in Temple Bar (on the other hand, how many straw bales would you get for a million these days?) Finding the ideal site is taking time; meanwhile, follow the project's fortunes at www.sustainable.buz.org.

The Village is, perhaps, the type of project most likely to complement a technocratic, middle-class culture: who said eco-friendly living had to wear a straggly beard and sandals? Indeed, it could set a model for many co-operative self-build projects as one good way round the housing crisis.

In the process, why not explore the whole "sustainable" ethic? The Village features in a monthly newsletter well worth following: e-mail sustainable.ireland@anu.ie with "subscribesustainableireland" as subject.