IT seems that you can't open any newspaper, or switch on the TV, without being bombarded with issues about global warming, carbon footprints and dwindling fossil fuel reserves. You could be forgiven for thinking that ecological awareness and careful husbandry of resources is something new to the 21st century.

I've got news for you - the French are streets ahead and have been for a long time. They have been powering the country, through all those long, unfashionable years, with the latest new super green fuel - nuclear energy.

The general population have been driving small, economical diesels for years. Fifty per cent of the bins that we drop our rubbish off at are recycling bins. And that is just things on the large scale.

On the home front there is something of a hangover from the paysan mentality. The paysans used to live sustainably, growing everything they needed and growing a small surplus to buy whatever they couldn't produce for themselves. This meant that they tended to buy little, and kept whatever they did have. You only have to visit some of the houses to see that people are still using perfectly serviceable furniture and kitchens from the 1960s and 70s that would have been skipped and replaced three times over in the UK.

The recycle and re-use mentality has always been at the forefront of the local construction industry. Many is the time that I strip apart a roof or a floor and notice old mortice joints and signs of planing that tell you that the timbers are on at least their second, if not their third, lease of life. The same goes for the walls. If stone walls are held together with mud or lime mortar, there is an almost infinite number of times that the stone can be re-used. If you look closely at the walls, you will see pieces of dressed stone from a former grander house, bits of floor tiles, and bricks from who knows where.

All of these things were done not so much from an altruistic "save the planet" angle, but more from a pragmatic approach to solving local problems. If you need to build a wall, you have little money and the nearest builders' merchant is miles away, what do you do? You use whatever is at hand. Many is the time that I have found myself short of materials, unwilling to face an hour-long round trip to buy more. I have rooted around and found an unpromising pile of old stone in the garden and used that instead of shiny new concrete blocks. The best thing about it is that when I have finished, I have something that fits so well with its surrounding environment that it could have been there forever. Voila, ecology.

My all-time favourite eco-construction is the dry stone wall. I have just built one in our garden to cover up a hideous block-work monstrosity that the former owner left behind. The garden is full of rocks, so I just gathered them all together and in less than four hours I had assembled them all together in a wall shape. I left plenty of room behind the wall to fill up with old concrete blocks from the demolition works, covered the lot with soil scraped up from the garden and topped it off with self-seeded box hedges dug up from the lower part of the garden.

I've been so eco-friendly that I think I might have to have a bonfire to redress the balance.