Is there life beyond the supermarket? We have just spent three absorbing years travelling in Britain, Europe, the US, Australia, India and Japan, staying and working among people living lightly on the Earth; people who have rejected the glamour of consumer society in order to follow their vision of a simpler life.

At the end of a steep and stony track in north Wales we found Suzanne Cooper chopping wood, with three young children tumbling around her like puppies. She and Daniel live self-reliantly (nobody can be self-sufficient), drawing their deepest satisfaction from work they do with their hands for themselves, not going backwards in time but sideways, moving out of the consumer culture.

Their vegetables and fruit, goats, chickens, pigs and geese feed them throughout the year; a windmill and solar panels light their sturdy old house, cisterns and hosepipes provide water. To run two wood-burning stoves, they chop wood. Without a mortgage, a car or a regular job, Suzanne believes she has found freedom.

"Getting enough money to buy things and service our possessions doesn't rule us." Part of their joy is in neighbourliness. "Last week I bartered a log basket for 20 rabbits, a good bargain as long as they don't all arrive at once."

In Tokyo's genteel Setagaya district we stayed with Mitsuko Matsushima, a housewife who runs the local branch of the Seikatsu Club Consumers' Co-operative. Seikatsu means "way of living". As well as promoting organic or near-organic produce by buying directly from farmers and distributing it to 230,000 households throughout Japan, the club promotes simpler living, local self-help groups and worker-collectives to enable women to do profitable work near their homes.

Each month Mitsuko is supposed to gather the 11 branch members to plan their orders for the month ahead, but they drop in every day, as much to chat as to do business. Her husband, Akihiro, a regular pre-dawn to post-dusk commuter, had long been sceptical of this fad, until the succulent taste of Seikatsu Club pork won him round.

Many Living Lightly people are vegetarian, convinced that the world can no longer afford the luxury of feeding precious grain to cattle. In a well-wooded village in New Jersey, three Dominican nuns run a community-supported organic farm. Seventy shareholders from all over the district come every week to collect their vegetables.

Sister Miriam McGillis, the community leader, invites them to take part in the sacrament of growing, cooking and eating wholesome food. But she isn't solemn about it: she assured us she didn't mind what visitors believe so long as they paid due respect to the food.

In every part of the world, local self-reliance has become an objective. In a poor and parched district of Maharashtra, India, we stayed with Ulhas Gore at his Academy of Development Science, where he promotes sustainable farming in opposition to the bankrupt orthodoxies of globalised "development". Ulhas wears the robust black beard that is politically correct among Indian environmentalists. Still unmarried at 48, he says he couldn't expect a wife to share his discomforts.

As an answer to gigantic dams such as the Narmada, which displace thousands of peasants and benefit mainly the rich, the academy builds small village dams designed to share out the water equitably. A food-processing unit, a school and an institute for herbal medicine all serve to further the ultimate aim: that enough work be generated in the villages that youngsters will not drift away into city slums.

In Utrecht, Holland, we stayed in the canal-side home that Paul Dijkstra shares with four other members of the Rainbow housing co-operative. The cobbled courtyard is slowly grassing itself over; in a wire pen, Paul keeps chickens and a noisy duck. He is founder of the VAKgroep, a network of workers' co-ops and housing co-ops dedicated to a simpler lifestyle and the belief that what people organise for themselves will work better than anything authority or business firms can set up.

"It was my personal ideal," said Arno, one of the members, "to be in a group, to live like Paul in a small housing community. We're not changing the world: all we want is to be free in our homes and our work, not to be owned."

WE FOUND many people moving towards more communal living through Cohousing. Private homes are clustered round a common, carfree space where children are safe, food can be grown, and a common house offers common meals as often as the members want. Hundreds of Cohousing groups flourish in Denmark, and the movement is spreading in the US, Canada and Australia.

More radical lifestyle movements include the "downshifters" in the Voluntary Simplicity Movement whom we found in Seattle, northwest US. They take courses in opting out and living with less. The cardinal rule is: buy what you need and don't go shopping.

Can we speak of a Living Lightly culture with members so diverse and so scattered? What unites them is the conviction that the global economy is not a blessing but a disaster: its victims are more numerous than its victors. It lowers the quality of life for almost everybody on Earth, even those whose standard of living it enhances.

It is self-evidently unsustainable: several planets the size of Earth would be needed to realise its implied promise that one day we will all live like rich Americans. And it destroys cultures, threatening to reduce all values to those of a hamburger/Coca-Cola society.

These scattered pioneers are working with considerable success on a local level to establish working models of an alternative to globalisation. They look to locally-based economies to reduce the needless transport of people and goods, healthier and tastier food, and more work as essential local needs are fulfilled that cannot be "afforded" today.

As local communities regenerate, the quality of life will improve, even if fewer brands of shampoo are in the shops, even if strawberries are not for sale in December.

Meanwhile, Living Lightly people are the radicals that matter now that the left, the right and the Third Way all claim that the global economy is the only game in town.

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.

Walter and Dorothy Schwarz's book, Living Lightly - Travels in Post-Consumer Society, is published by Jon Carpenter. Walter is a freelance journalist; Dorothy teaches creative writing and is author of Simple Stories About Women, published by Iron Press