Up a dirt path at the top of a hill in the middle of a conifer wood, a dozen people live in yurts and cabins constructed of timber and resting on the bare earth. After prolonged planning battles they have permission to live like this on their collectively owned land. If sustainability is a faith, they could be seen as a faith community. As a voluntary movement, they see no need for grants, but want planning laws to be simplified. This is Tinkers' Bubble in South Somerset. The low impact of the dwellings on the land, and the possibility of dismantling and moving them, is an important criterion. Organic and sustainable use of the land, in this case forestry, organic gardening and a cider orchard, is another aspect.

I hear that the community at Kingshill near Glastonbury are pagans, they have a sacred circle on their land, and gardens, but the site is not large enough to think of serious self-sufficiency. The site at Dragons Hill has a more transient population. My informant thought it would be hard to evict people from the easily fortified hilltop, and futile, in that the same or similar people would return. A complication is that this is an SSSI with rare species. I hear there is a rash of similar dwellings in Somerset and Devon which are "illegal" and prolonged planning enquiries and enforcement procedures have "negative resource implications" for authorities who are therefore inclined to take no action.

I have been impressed at the creativity in the growth of the eco-protest movement over the last fifteen years. I have visited people living in a wooden fort in the path of a motorway and seen others living in hammocks in the tops of trees. I have only heard about the tunnel dwellers. One of these excavators was a professional earning a high salary, who when not living in a hole in the ground, did contract work for the MOD. One should not take a cliched view of these people therefore. But while I was there he met up with a man from another site and they talked about the relative merits of tunnelling in clay and sand. Clay is secure but tends to flooding, while the man burrowing in sand said he had been buried two or three times by the stuff. You have to have a passion for the earth to do this. In Australia they call the young people who do these kinds of things "ferals", they have gone wild again, which may be an accurate way of seeing it.

We are talking about people, who, whether they may have been travellers, ferals, pagans or ecologists, are stubbornly diverse and fear categorisation. They know categorisation is the means the ruling culture uses to dump on them, to persecute them. While they are fiercely independent, they will say they are just like anybody else. Rural resettlement meets a need, for a significant minority of people who choose to live close to the earth. The problems of homelessness and lack of resources they deal with in their own way, but social and cultural recognition is obviously a deep problem as it requires adjustment by members of the ruling culture, which takes time. Helping rural resettlement would in my view give that time to ease social exclusion. Planning regulations are unhelpful to settlers and cause difficulties for local authorities, and a reinterpretation which included criteria such as resettlement, low impact dwellings and sustainable projects could be a mutual way forward.

Those who have such a passion for the earth they want to live close to her can be called pagan in its original sense, and do not require special ceremonies or theology to justify consideration under a spiritual dimension. We would therefore wish to support their choice of lifestyle. The implications for the world and for our society in terms of experiments in ecological and sustainable living do not need to be spelled out as I think we are familiar with the idea our present civilisation is not sustainable which logically means it will not last. Key sites, like Tinkers Bubble, have an educational role and can provide practical benchmarks in sensitive land management applicable in other contexts. This particularly when the crisis in the agricultural economy requires, some may think, the countryside to be creatively reinvented.

For these various reasons I would suggest that people who want to settle on the land and can meet resettlement, low impact, and sustainability criteria, should be given scope within the regulations. This would require special study and may require changes in national legislation.

George Firsoff