On his 40th birthday, Tom Good decided there was more to life than designing free plastic toys for breakfast cereals. The next day he resigned from his job, sold his car and dug up the front lawn of his Surbiton home. He and his wife, Barbara, would grow vegetables and soft fruit, and keep pigs, goats, chickens and-one day-a cockerel called Lenin. They would be self-sufficient.

From the first episode in April 1975, the BBC series "The Good Life" tapped into a new wholesomeness in British life. A nation battered by the OPEC crisis and the three-day week had found a sitcom that caught the same mood as E.F. Schumacher's book "Small is Beautiful" (1973), John Taylor's "Enough is Enough" (1975) and John Seymour's "The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency" (1976). It wasn't just Britain: "The Good Life" was shown on PBS in America as "Good Neighbors".

Three decades after Tom Good took the rotavator to his front lawn, a new generation of the good life has sprung up-this time in the blogosphere. The best of the English-language ones are dotted around North America. In an apartment on Fifth Avenue, a 43-year-old man, his wife and two-year-old child attempt to live without making any net impact on the environment. That means no toilet paper. He gets plenty of advice from readers who have lived in the Middle East or India on what to do instead.

In Toronto, a 29-year-old single woman takes one new action a day for a year, from banning all polystyrene to getting rid of her car. Each step must stick. In Seattle, Crunchy Chicken, a mother of two, trying to reduce her family's energy consumption, runs a green book club, a low-impact week, a local food month and a discussion on reusable menstrual cups (complete with photo). As she cheerfully puts it: "Waaaay more information than you probably wanted."

Exercises in "voluntary simplicity" have been part of the literary landscape since Horace quit Rome for the countryside in about 33BC. (Exercises in involuntary simplicity are best represented by "Robinson Crusoe".) In North America, the simple life may always have been a minority pursuit, but it punches above its weight, drawing on associations with the puritan and Quaker settlers, the communalism of the Amish and the Shakers, and the rugged self-sufficiency of the frontiersmen.

The single most influential experiment in simple living was made by Henry David Thoreau. In 1845, he spent two years, two months and two days in a cabin by the shore of Walden Pond. Many writers have followed the model of Thoreau's "Walden", but Hollywood felt safe ignoring this tradition. As the Harvard academic Lawrence Buell wrote in "The Environmental Imagination" (1995), the "aesthetics of relinquishment" lie more in solitude and attentiveness than plot and character.

Till now, that is: the good-life bloggers are changing the narrative rules by linking to each other, responding to each other and egging each other on. Suddenly, there are characters and plots to burn! Take that business about the big, fat energy-guzzler lurking in the corner of the kitchen....

It was Greenpa who raised the issue of the refrigerator. Greenpa is a 58-year-old father of three. He only started Little Blog in the Big Woods on March 24th 2007 when he read an article in the New York Times two days earlier about Colin Beavan, the guy on Fifth Avenue, otherwise known as No Impact Man. Greenpa is a veteran simple lifer. "Off the grid. 30 years...Composting toilet. Outside. (eew, you do that indoors!?)...No road to house...No running water..." He realised he'd been doing this stuff for so long he had some insights of his own to pass on.

Six days into his blog, Greenpa announced: "If you live in a city-you do not need a refrigerator...A great deal of what's in your fridge absolutely does NOT need to be there." Butter lasts two weeks, eggs one week, tomatoes four days. He explained how to seal meat so it keeps for three or four days.

His post was read in Toronto by Vanessa Farquharson, the woman making one change a day. Thirty days in, she had decided that forgoing cold yogurt, ice cream and chilled white wine was not going to be one of them. "I made that spirally motion with my index finger next to my ear", she wrote later, "because that's just crazy talk." But Vanessa did inspect her fridge and noticed that inside there were two dials. On April 19th, 50 days in, a picture of her empty freezer appeared on her blog Green as a Thistle. The freezer part had been switched off.

Over in Seattle, the blonde mother of two, who blogs as Crunchy Chicken, wrote to Vanessa: "We're not quite ready to make that step yet, but I'm rooting for you!" From his hideaway in the woods, Greenpa wrote to Vanessa too. "Brava!" Now he recommended that Vanessa start removing "the stuff in the fridge that really doesn't have to be there".

Another 28 days on, Vanessa's blog had a photo of the empty interior of her fridge: "OK, listen up Little Blog in the Big Woods: I did it. I unplugged my fridge. Not just the freezer, the entire fridge. NO FRIDGE. Do I get green-freak status yet or what?" Over in San Diego, LaVonne Ellis, who had joined the 90% reduction challenge, linked on her blog to Greenpa, Colin Beavan and Vanessa with the words: "Wow. I've just experienced a mindshift."

When it came to Green Freak status, the competition was hotting up. Four days before Vanessa had unplugged her fridge, Colin Beavan had gone and thrown the circuit breaker on his Fifth Avenue apartment, plunging his wife and two-year-old child into a world without an electric light, fridge, TV, kettle or vacuum cleaner. This is on the same street as Tiffany, Cartier and Saks. Colin had to write fast when posting the news on his blog as his computer was now powered by solar energy. The main problem, he said, other than brushing his teeth in the dark, was that he had been keeping his daughter Isabella's milk in a "pot fridge" and it wasn't cold enough.

"Mazel Tov," wrote Sharon Astyk, a few hours later, from her farm near Knox in upstate New York. Sharon advised Colin to keep Isabella's milk in a bucket of cold water. As well as a farmer, Sharon Astyk is a 35-year-old mother of four and a lapsed PhD candidate in English Literature, who has blogged, forcefully and elegantly, at Casaubon's Book since 2004. Sharon has just completed her first month of "rioting for austerity". On July 1st, she announced that "the big step will be the fridge turn off". It certainly will be big: this is a family of six. After that, they are considering "going entirely without grid power".

Not everyone approves of others pursuing the good life. In the TV series, Tom and Barbara Good had Jerry and Margo Leadbetter raising their eyebrows over the garden fence. Robert Louis Stevenson said Thoreau was a "skulker" and thought that "so many negative superiorities begin to smack a little of the prig". The role of Margo is being filled today by Vanessa Farquharson's mother. Four months into her year-long experiment, Vanessa writes: "My mother tells me that I smell, my hair looks crap and I'll never get a boyfriend."