I HAVE just watched the conclusion of the engaging and instructive series on BBC2 called ‘Victorian Farm’. It traced a year of ups and downs in the life of a small Shropshire country living as it would have been 150 or so years ago.

If you think times are hard now, think again. Yet despite the privations, the commitment of the three volunteers was portrayed as immensely fulfilling. If this was indeed a true representation of farming life, it had many lessons to teach us about valuing what is produced naturally, the art of sufficiency, prudence and recycling.

Although I admit that at one stage I faced being put off eating pork forever, the sheer range of activities and invention mastered by our forebears was truly remarkable.

Where have all those skills gone? Perhaps the greatest feature I’ll remember was the economy of their existence. Everything was recycled. OK, produce didn’t arrive in packaging in the first place, but all leftovers were broken down and put to further use. It makes stark comparison with the acres of 21st century waste we now see baled and stockpiled in UK fields and warehouses awaiting recycling, which, since the economic downturn, has ceased to be marketable.

The theory is admirable. The more we recycle, the better for the environment and the less overall rubbish is produced. But that depends on a relatively robust process to convince us potential recyclers to buy in. It becomes self-defeating if, at any stage, the effort overwhelms the ambition — for example inconveniently located sites, too many picky restrictions on the nature of the items to be deposited, or any impression that despite all the pre-sorting, the stuff will just be heaped up, mashed together and burned in a fiery furnace — or, worse, left rotting in plain view as a testament to failure.

You may remember that our new incinerator, despite its gross dimensions, was actually scaled down under protest because of the faith placed in our avowed appetite for recycling and a more modest prediction of population growth. Let’s hope that when this budget-busting monster is relentlessly chomping on a diet of everything that can conceivably be chucked in, we don’t find that we’ve ended up with the worst of both worlds — a Ramsar-invading eyesore and piles of unwanted recyclables nobody wants to process.

If the long-running wrangle over acquisition, consumption and disposal has taught us anything, it’s that we live in an extremely vulnerable environment. Essential supplies, particularly food and fuel, can fall victim to the vagaries of weather, market forces and availability. We have progressively manoeuvred ourselves into a precarious predicament by buying into the ‘just in time’ philosophy of manufacturers and suppliers, which is fine if all the links remain in place. But we have removed local storage from too many pipelines.

We’ve seen the evidence on depleted supermarket shelves during periods of bad weather or strikes. At the same time, we’ve reduced our own self-sufficiency by conniving in the rundown of local industries — dairy, fishing and even tomatoes. Short-term savings are no substitute for long-term resilience.

The suggestion that we should invest in a gas pipeline to continental Europe provokes yet more pause for thought. Although initially an expensive alternative to shipping, it could indeed over time save us from the sort of interruption of energy supplies caused by tempest or operational hiccups that brought Alderney to the brink of emergency rationing in the past weeks, and I know that in good years it’s great to be able simply to turn on a tap. But if it meant relying on one supplier and scaling down yet more strategic storage facilities, we’d have to ask ourselves serious questions about the unnecessary amputation of the nose on a despised face.

Two weeks ago, Tim Smit of the Eden Project, apeaking at the Guernsey Enterprise Awards, put our island predicament in a nutshell. He told Channel Television: ‘You are fantastically vulnerable. You’ve got loads of agricultural expertise, but because you’ve got such a sexy finance area, you feel impervious to the outside world.’ But as it dawns on us that the global downturn is affecting us all, one of the more worrying aspects may well be that priorities will change with the ‘nice to haves’ jettisoned in favour of the ‘necessary for survival’.

To the undoubted despair of environmentalists, best practices such as costly recycling would weigh less in a community under pressure. But let’s not be apocalyptic. We wouldn’t regress totally overnight. Systems are well in place, and indeed there is every possibility that we might see the regeneration of local generating and recycling industries. We know we have become serial wasters because for so long we have not had to consider the balance between what we purchase and discard with what we could produce and utilise.

Now one prominent player who reckons to know a lot about waste (managing it, rather than creating it), Deputy Rob Duhamel, is championing a scheme for Islanders to identify parcels of land to grow vegetables and raise animals. It’s not a new idea, as the 1930s photograph of South Hill published recently in the JEP’s Temps Passé demonstrates.

Faded Occupation recipes may not bring back many fond memories, but at least they provide proof that a community such as ours can survive, even flourish, with a little ingenuity. The experiences of the doughty cast of BBC 2 enthusiasts may not inspire a local stampede to snap up vergées of local farmland to set up smallholdings or allotments, but there’s no doubting the appeal of the ‘Good Life’. And it’s not as if we haven’t been there before.