In this post-industrial age the move “back to nature” need not be overly romantic in the sense of rejecting either all machines or all other people. If like Thoreau we Want to live in an isolated cabin in the woods then it will be much more “natural” (as human beings) to live with our families and in a community of like-minded people; we can also hang onto our computers, TVs, and even our cars without abandoning ourselves to mindless consumerism. This is the notion of “simplicity with complexity”: to simplify our lives (following Thoreau’s famous admonition to “Simplify! Simplify! Simplify!”) within a complex human social. network which, extended further, includes the ecosystem in which our community is situated. This may look like a return to the traditional life of people in the past, especially in smaller villages and countryside areas. But the argument here, presented through a brief reading of several recently-published books, is that this is also a necessary direction for us to move in now, at the beginning of the 21st century, in our post-industrial, postcolonial, postmodernist societies filled with industrial and technological waste, corporate greed and corruption, blind consumerism, social and familial fragmentation, individual loneliness, confusion and despair. The return to lives of “complex simplicity,” where we need not sacrifice all of our high-tech advancements but rather need to use them wisely, and where the focus is on human intimacy within the family and community, is also the return to a more highly developed ecological (supra-individual, ultimately supra-anthropocentric) awareness.