Some 30 years ago, when Nelson Lebo was a boy, a lot of land along un-maintained town roads that led to New Hampshire's abandoned hill farms was repopulated by artists, artisans, organic farmers and others who wanted to live a simpler life. Many of them, until age softened them at least, lived a lot like those who came before them on the land. They cut firewood, split shingles with a mallet and froe, used outhouses and kerosene lamps and made use of what a wealthy society discarded.

They lived, in many respects like Nelson Lebo, the Andover resident profiled by Monitor reporter Chelsea Conaboy on Sunday. Like Lebo, they too kept a copy of a book by the homesteading economist-philosophers Helen and Scott Nearing somewhere close at hand. Lebo has made an art and a science of living off the land, much the way the Nearings did in Vermont and Maine for six decades. Like them, he has lessons to teach.

Often, back to the basics movements, fads, trends - call them what you will - are driven by post-apocalyptic visions of a society in Depression-era economic hardship, if not post-war destruction. Lebo, who owns no car and travels by bicycle, skis or on foot, is on a mission to teach people how to live in a way that consumes less energy and fewer of the earth's resources. He too sees a change coming.

"I've been living in a post-petroleum world for the last 18 years," he told Conaboy. "Everyone else is going to start living in a post-petroleum world next year." If you've bought home heating oil lately you know what he means.

Lebo teaches those who take his seminars how to live on less and love it. But he knows that not everyone has a woodlot for heat and space for a garden. The point, he stresses, is to do what you can, but to understand that there's a lot you can do. Most people have the space to grow a little food. Even a couple of tomato plants in containers helps. And almost everyone can tighten up their home a little more to keep the heat in and cold out, use less water, eat a little less high on the hog and skip unnecessary auto trips.

Many people may soon have to do all those things and more, but the lesson from Lebo is, if you do, don't consider yourself deprived. Instead take pride in living more lightly on the land.