House of Eratosthenes

Halloween can be an especially eco-unfriendly holiday. There’s the single-use plastic of red devil costumes, countless candy wrappers (not to mention the refined sugar, high-fructose corn syrup and artificial color of the candies themselves) and disposable decorations. According to the National Retail Federation’s Halloween Consumer Intentions and Actions Survey, Americans will spend more than $5 million on Halloween paraphernalia this year. That’s more than $5 million worth of stuff that ultimately ends up impacting the earth.

So this year I’m going to seize the opportunity to right my wrongs. As I get ready to introduce my child to his first Halloween, I’m making sure that I add a bit of earth awareness to the preparations. This is how I plan to make Halloween green:

There follow a whole bunch of helpful tips. Together, we can do this!

Well, the missus and I are going to a green costume party ourselves, so I can’t snicker too hard. And I’ve been riding my bike for all my errands all month long. It’s my way of “protesting” the whole enviro-whacko movement: The best way to devastate a silly idea is to take it seriously, so the notion my car can kill the planet, is one I intend to take one hundred percent seriously. I rode my bike this week and the week before! If I didn’t, the planet would be dead! Yay me!

Like I tell some of my environmentally conscious friends: “You ‘global warming’ people always drive such big cars.”

All this zeal about environmentally-sound tips and tricks, is strangely focused on “coming together.” It’s presented as success in the face of overwhelming odds. But it’s not about success, it’s about togetherness. “I’m on the bandwagon; are YOU on the bandwagon?” A wonderful way to get that deer-in-the-headlights look from an environmentally conscious goo-gooder is to ask — hey, what if we don’t band together on “this thing,” and succeed anyway? In fact, what is the goal exactly?

And if we work together doing all the things like good little ants, and the planet dies out anyway, did we fail?

The enviro-people can’t answer questions like those. They aren’t ready to admit that environmentalism is a way of life…a group-based, anti-individualist way of looking at things, and of living life. It is the replacement of one religion with another.

Last time I saw this going on, it had to do with reducing the size of cars. Here it is thirty years later, and it’s all about the little things…while the environmental zealots go ahead and drive whatever they want. To work. Ten or twenty miles one way. Shuttling back and forth nothing besides their own asses plus a Blackberry or Palm Pilot, maybe a laptop.

But be sure and wear that organic costume once a year.

Shuttling back and forth nothing besides their own asses plus a Blackberry or Palm Pilot, maybe a laptop.

But be sure and wear that organic costume once a year.

Well golly, Isn’t Halloween all about indulgences for actually dressing like a whore once a year?
- CaptDMO | 10/15/2008 @ 09:12
If we don’t band together we, don’t have a movement. If we don’t have a movement, we have nothing to preach about. If we don’t get to preach, we don’t get to feel superior. If we don’t get to feel superior, we have no motivation to care.

For the “-ists” of the world, caring isn’t a moral compulsion, it’s a weighted decision, and they’ll get behind it if they can “get mine” in the process.

Here’s a D’Jever Notice for ya: D’Jever notice how a message of sacrifice always seems to promise a substitute? “If you give THIS up, you can still have a movement-approved THAT!” Not sacrifice at all. We want you to give up chocolate this Halloween – well, unless you substitute chocolate made by a company that props up the message and the agenda. That is how you sacrifice for the common good.
- Andy | 10/15/2008 @ 09:56
It’s an attractive-looking young lady writing the column, but if you look at her archives her whole role seems to be to find the most eco-friendly way to do anything & everything. I dunno if she has any brain cycles left over to think about dressing like a slut, but who knows.

The car thing, as I’ve written before, is surreal to me and it borders on distressing. When Carter screwed everything up, we spent the first few years of the eighties driving plastic, aluminum and tin things that one man of medium build could easily tip over, if he had a mind to do it. That made sense; velocity of an object is proportional to the square root of the kinetic energy in that object, divided by the MASS. And a car is something you drive all year.

Today it’s all about denial of fun. Denial of individual thinking, and denial of fun. Otherwise, why wouldn’t our eco-friendly movement kind of “buddy up” with this trend of nice looking ladies dressing like whores once a year? The tinier the costume, the less energy involved in manufacturing it, transporting it, selling it, and recycling it. If Halloween costumes mattered, the ideal costume for the fair maidens would be an “eco fairy” running around in minimal strips of green gauze…raising…ahem…”awareness” in the bystanders everywhere.

And yet — all you get out of these people is “skip the streamers and don’t wear plastic.”
- mkfreeberg | 10/15/2008 @ 10:02
Now, Now, be a little kind. I can’t imagine the hell this people are living in. A faux religion that has no dogma? No canon? If religion does anything, it should be an anchor for your soul, and this people have a big old sail instead…..
- Robert Mitchell Jr. | 10/15/2008 @ 10:29

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Green HalloweenWednesday, October 15th, 2008

Green Halloween
Wednesday, October 15th, 2008