It is becoming increasingly common in environmental circles to hear people denounce new technologies by quoting Einstein: "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them".

Certainly, you cannot back out of a dead end if you insist on remaining in first gear but, equally, your destination may remain elusive if you get out of the car and walk. So where do solutions lie?

Last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the technology we need to solve our environmental problems already exists, pointing to solar and wind power, greater efficiency in buildings and lighting, as well as more controversial ideas such as nuclear and carbon capture and storage - an as yet unproven technology that captures carbon dioxide as it is released from a power station and stores it in old oil wells.

Around the same time, an experiment in Germany backed up the IPCC's findings. Although not without its teething problems, it showed base load power - the constant amount of electricity we need to keep everything ticking over - could be generated using only renewable power.

But the technologists viewpoint is still not always so welcome. At a talk earlier this month by Dr Jim Watson, deputy director of the Sussex Energy Group and deputy leader of the Tyndall Centre's climate change and energy programme, he said he believed in a technological solution to climate change. The room - predominantly made up of environmental campaigners - gasped in collective horror.

In his defence, he says he thinks technology has a big role to play and it's not a questions of either that or lifestyle changes, it's a combination.

"It's how the two things interact," he says. "I was talking about the idea of decentralised energy and how it brings energy supply closer to people, which might change their behaviour because they can see it, rather than it being generated in some faraway place.

People are in two minds because they don't want it in their back yard.

"My argument is we can meet all these environmental targets and keep the model of out of sight, out of mind' but you get the big technological fixes like nuclear and carbon capture and storage. But they are a bit risky, and that is where environmentalists start to worry and I sympathise with that.

I get a bit sceptical about the big fixes because it is just curing one problem by creating another. It would be crazy to rush into those things."

Of course, there are bad experiences that make people reluctant to welcome new technologies, but Martin Jordan says it goes deeper than that.

Martin is a senior lecturer in counselling, psychotherapy and mental health at the University of Brighton.

He also practises ecotherapy, a form of therapy which examines people's connection to the natural world.

He says: "Industrialisation moved us away from the seasons, from food growing at particular times, from a more nature-based spirit system. As people have become more concerned with the environment they can look back at the time before industrialisation and, in a romantic sense, think you can get rid of those problems by returning to that."

He also says people are realising our disconnection from nature is at the heart of the environmental crisis. Technology gives the illusion we can master and control things, protect ourselves in some way from the adverse effects of the environment and the fact life is unpredictable. But in recent years there have been many natural disasters and there is a feeling we cannot have that sense of mastery any more.

"The crisis is arguably of our own making, in ignoring we have a reciprocal agreement with the environment,"

he says. "Climate change is going to come back and remind us of that, it's a growing realisation."

One person who felt the need to reconnect with nature was food writer Gilly Smith. She moved to Brighton from London in the late-1990s to get away from the pollution and find a better life for her children. Gilly and her husband, journalism lecturer Jed Novick, then started thinking about moving again, this time to the country.

They ended up in a glass-fronted ecohouse 20 minutes outside Brighton.

She says: "We got really scared of living in the country with posh people whose dogs are not crossbreeds and who drive Range Rovers. But then there was the idea of having a space our children could run around in and, of course, it isn't how we thought at all.

"And from an environmental point of view, I firmly believe the oil is going to be running out soon and when that happens I don't want to be living in a city, I want to be where the food grows."

Because of her profession, the food aspect is particularly important to Gilly and while she is far from selfsufficient - having just about managed to grow some runner beans and a mint plant - she has very close ties with her community, living a much more earthy experience, from buying milk from the farmer across the road to her young daughter pinching herbs from their neighbour's garden. They are even considering getting some goats to graze their land, rather than using a petrol mower.

She says: "I love the fact living off the land means supporting the animals, supporting biodiversity. I feel much more connected to environmental issues rather than just reading about them in the paper.

"The thing is, there is climate change and the oil is running out - it's only a matter of time - and people go with the superhero philosophy of We'll be OK', but I don't think so. It's a great challenge. To me it's a great positive challenge: drink the milk from down the road, eat the lamb from the Downs, use what we have here."

Martin Jordan thinks running off to the country is great in principle but affordability makes it impossible for everyone to do. He says there has to be sustainable living in cities and towns, too. He also questions the wholesale rejection of new technologies: "It's about what we accept and reject. Of course we can't get rid of technology. In the service of humans and the planet it isn't a bad thing - solar and renewables are inherently technological solutions.

We just have to think about how we use it and what it's put in the service of - whether it's human centred or environment centred."