Green Daily

Did Captain Watson mind being harpooned in the head on South Park? Still looking for last-minute DIY costume ideas? Are you headed out to wreak some low-carbon havoc on Mischief Night? Today's Eco-Beat has the scoop on all the latest green news and tips.

Captain Watson Responds to South Park As usual, South Park's "Whale Whores" episode was an equal opportunity offender, lampooning both the Japanese whalers, animal rights activists and especially Paul Watson. He was a good sport about it though, saying that he's just glad to get some publicity.

Reduce Your Family's Halloween-Print Halloween is finally upon us, and of course I'm going to load this EB up with as much green trick or treating tips as I possibly can. To check out a smorgasbord of green Halloween tips -- including healthy treats, non-treats, and DIY costume ideas -- check out Inhabitat.

Greener Mischief Making Watching Rainn Wilson's guide to Mischief Night, I realized something: vandalism can be mighty wasteful. For a greener Mischief Night, skip the TP and try some eco-friendly tricks, like: ding dong ditching or jumping out of the bushes to scare people. Any other ideas?

Eat Your Pumpkin! The majority of the orange pumpkins we associate with Halloween are bred purely for ornamental purposes, thus, they're far from ideal for cooking. Bummer. Buy a food-grade pumpkin or butternut squash that allows you to have your jack-o-lantern and eat it too.

Natalie Portman's Controversial Veggie Comment In honor of "Vegetarian Month," Natalie decided to throw in her two cents on ethical eating. Unfortunately, she managed to offend non-veggies by equating meat-eating and table manners with rape ... somehow. I'm a big fan of table manners, thank you very much.

Green in a Flash:

• LG is the first electronics company to get certified by UL Environment.
• Michael Pollan retracts statements about the vegan H2 driver.
• According to scientists, exaggerated reports about climate change can undermine the goal of reducing emissions.

Did the Governator send a piece of brilliantly-crafted, obscenity-laced, water reform poetry to the California Legislature? How could I have missed the Climate Action Day supermodel striptease? Could handing out green treats actually increase the size of your Halloween-print? Today's Eco-Beat has the scoop on all the latest green news and tips.

Arnold Might be a Water Reform Poet Apparently, Governor Schwarzenegger is really ticked off at the state legislature for not tackling water reform in the session that just ended. Upon closer examination, his letter to legislators appears to have a hidden message that starts with "F" and ends with "U."

Supermodels Perform the Part Per Million Striptease Taking a page out of PETA's playbook, 350.org hired a group of models to grab our attention by stripping down. It totally worked (of course), but near the end of the video I started thinking: "Geez, these models are scary thin." For me, it sent kinda mixed signals.

Leo and Ellen Page Go Eco House Hunting They're not moving in together or anything. At least, I don't think they are. Leonardo brought the co-star of his new film "Inception" to inspect the earth-friendly features of LA's Evo South condos. Leo's becoming quite the green real estate tycoon.

More Eco-Friendly Halloween Tips Your green Halloween efforts may have unintended side effects. For example, Grist suggests that you hand out "non-treats" like acorns, polished rocks, etc. While that is green advice, you might be inadvertently creating waste by encouraging kids to TP your house.

Junk Food is as Addictive as Heroin Not only does junk food make you fat, provide little or no nourishment, and come with a heavy carbon footprint, now researchers have found that it actually produces a similar neurobiological reaction to heroin -- which explains why I'm eating Hot Fries right now.

Green in a Flash:

• Recycled Vespas make awesome office chairs!
• Dell HQ has planted solar trees in its massive parking lot.
• Depending on how you do the math, illegal logging makes Indonesia the third largest greenhouse emitter.

When was the last time you saw Madonna holding a shovel? Will Japanese whalers kill Kenny? Are you handing out carbon offset stickers instead of candy this Halloween? Today's Eco-Beat has the scoop on all the latest green news and tips.

Madonna Plants a Tree in Malawi The Queen of Pop returned to her favorite developing country yesterday to break ground on her $15M girls school in the village of Chinkhota. She wasn't just there to cut ribbons and dig holes, she also planted a Moringa tree (aka a "miracle tree") in the future school yard.

South Park Spoofs Whale Wars Who better to explore the ethical and cultural implications of "The Cove" and "Whale Wars" than Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and, of course, Kenny. Tomorrow night, South Park's highly inappropriate satire meisters take on whale hunters and the people who hunt them.

Five Tips for a Greener Halloween Going green this Halloween doesn't mean you have to be the weird house on the block who gives out organic apples instead of candy. You could promote green power by turning your yard into a haunted wind farm. Or you could check out Inhabitat's green Halloween tips.

Do You Use a Clothesline? Good news! By doing nothing particularly drastic, Americans could cut our collective carbon footprint by about the size of France's total output. All we have to do is to take 17 steps, the most drastic of which is to end our love affair with dryers. Can we live without dryers?

Know Your Senate Climate Bills According to Grist, Senate climate legislation is kinda like Baskin-Robins, except there are more than 31 flavors. If you wanna learn about all of the crazy concoctions that legislators have mixed up, grab one of those little tester spoons and sample Grist's flavor guide.

Green in a Flash:

• A ridgeblade rooftop wind turbine might appease your HOA.
• Which outputs more mercury: CFLs or incandescent bulbs?
• Is bottled water greener if it's "bottled" in a recyclable cardboard container?

So what's your Halloween costume this year? Oh, you don't have one? That's okay, we have some eco-friendly and oh-so-clever ideas for you!

Being sustainable doesn't mean you have to wear an unimaginative, boring, hemp bag. Just the opposite, unless you're going as a Wet Blanket Environmentalist.

Get out your creativity, roll up your sleeves, and prepare ready to wow your friends and neighbors with these environmentally smart Halloween costumes.

When you're a kid, Halloween is your chance to get a ton of candy, for free, which you then eat until you get sick. And when you're an adult, it's a reason to buy all the candy you'd normally never let in the house ... which you then eat until you get sick.

Here's the truly scary part: it's not just overeating that makes you sick, it's the stuff in most commercially produced candy bars that will make you turn green, even if you're only reading the label!

I was checking out Fitsugar, and was reminded that most candy contains high fructose corn syrup and food coloring. Bad, but if you're only indulging once or twice a year, not going to kill you. But then there are the hydrogenated oils, which are so bad they even cause miscarriages!

I'm not ready to move on to Thanksgiving, yet. So here's one more Halloween story: Vampire bats like to sing duets with the other bats in their roost. One of the reasons for this songmaking may be so they can share victims. Isn't that sweet, in a ghoulish way?

Scientists in New Mexico have been studying white-winged vampire bats from Trinidad. The researchers use chickens as the blood "donors" (don't worry, they didn't let the bats kill the chickens, just snack on them). In their observations, they noted that the bats made a lot of noise when the chickens where brought in for feeding.

To understand what all the chirping was about, they did some further testing and discovered that each bat has his or her own "song" and that bats from the same roost could identify individual bats by their songs.

The researchers believe that the songs express the bat's identity, location and "feelings". The evolutionary need for this kind of skill would be to make it easier for the more successful blood hunters in a roost to communicate with the rest of the group, and call them over to share meals.

Now that's an image out of a horror movie: dozens of bats, swarming around a victim, all merrily chirping away to each other. Happy late Halloween!

Traditional Halloween costumes can be really wasteful, not to mention expensive. And sometimes you want your outfit to carry a message about how you feel about the environment.

If you're scrambling for a last minute costume that displays your green bona fides, there are a few go-to-costumes we can suggest.

Naked protesters are easy enough to ape, and the costume is cheap. At most you have to spring for some ketchup to use as fake blood, and you don't even have to get the expensive organic kind, unless you expect someone to be licking it off later.

Sarah Palin is terrifying, the scariest thing to hit polar bears since ever. And what's sexier than Mother Nature, a la Angelina Jolie's recent fruitfulness? Or a sexy hobo, to help raise awareness around the issue of homelessness?

It's important to remember that this is a joyful, fun holiday. As with non-green costumes, who ever you decide to be, the "Sexy" version is best.

Showing a little skin doesn't contribute to global warming, although it might cause some physical rising, if you know what I mean!

In the gallery, check out our Sexy Green Costume ideas!



Photo courtesy of Getty Images.

Sure, John F. Kennedy delivered a great many powerful speeches throughout the course of his natural life, but now the he's come back from the dead, his ability to drive home a challenging yet engaging message to the nation has reached new levels. Just in time for Halloween, JFK is back, and his undead mind is focused on pushing Greenpeace's new renewable Energy [R]evolution.

Better Homes and Gardens Danny Seo was on CBS with some hints and tricks for a greener Halloween. Some of the ideas - buying LED Halloween lights - were just another reason to spend money but other ideas were pretty cute.

Bats from egg cartons, grinding up extra hard candies into powder for your coffee and painting rocks with glow-in-the-dark nontoxic paint that charges up by the sun were all good ideas that didn't encourage you to buy tons of stuff.

What are you doing that is extra green this year for Halloween? I'll be out of town but I plan to snag any leftover pumpkins come Sunday and roast the seeds and get them ready to put in the freezer. I've recently discovered a great pumpkin chocolate chip cookie recipe!

With a few recyclables around the house and some creativity, kids can march in the school parade as a composter, recycling bin or tree. As for the commenter suggesting anyone who would dress their kid as such is a mean green parent, well, I'm not sure you can force kids to smile for photos like this. At least there's no way my kid would do that.

But I don't think I'll be able to convince her to give up the butterfly costume she'll be wearing to be a composter, either. Her costume is somewhat eco-friendly; black pants and turtle neck with some wings she'll keep to play butterfly whenever she wants. Plus, she's promoting wildlife!

Make a clever 'green-inspired' Halloween costume and reap the benefits.

Party planner to the stars, Marcy Blum, is most famous for her successful events designed for the likes of Billy Joel, Kyra Sedgwick and Kevin Bacon, and the Rockefellers. This fall she has turned her attention to helping you throw an eco-friendly Halloween party.

You can make a big difference with your party by what you feed your guests to how you dress. Chances are you will be doing some shopping for your big event so it's important to keep a few things in mind:

• Stick to Fair Trade chocolates and feed your guests fresh local and organic foods.
• Buy plates and utensils that can be recycled or composted -- and do just that. It might help to have carefully labeled receptacles around the house.
  
• Costume yourself in natural fabrics or just use what you have around the house.
• If you must buy decorations, choose reusable, Fair Trade Certified products.
  

For more ideas, check out our Blum inspired gallery below.

Every Halloween we would watch as our dad carved our chosen pumpkin. After the innards were disposed of, a face with triangular features appeared. For one night our pumpkin shown bright on our porch steps until is was smashed by a neighborhood hooligan or tossed in the trash.

With some families doing entire pumpkin vignettes with half a dozen squash on their steps, that's a lot of wasted goodness. Here are a few ways to get the most out of your pumpkin.

Tucked deep into my closet you will find a stash of costumes ranging from infant to adult. Cat Woman, an angel, a flamingo, a lion and a caterpillar are only a few of the creatures that lurk in the dark. As my kids grow and my interests change, there is no need to keep holding on to these outfits that will no longer be worn by anyone in our home.

On the other hand, these costumes have not lost their usefulness and as Halloween quickly approaches, now might be a good time to recycle them. Here are a few tips beyond the usual "Rs" of recycling: