Ten earth-friendly ideas to spark your imagination

Intangibles can deliver green good all year long (and reduce clutter)

1. Donate time or money to a charity in honor of the gift recipient (a gift to Environmental Defense is a good choice).

2. Buy carbon offsets in the recipient’s name. Along with cutting your own carbon emissions — and fuel bills — help your friends and family offset theirs.

3. Give a national parks pass or a membership to botanical gardens or aquariums. (For an extra-special gift, surprise with a cross-country train tour or an eco-vacation.)

Stocking stuffers can be “green”

4. Give energy-saving light bulbs. The technology in these earth-friendly bulbs has leapt ahead, and they now come in many shapes and sizes (See Environmental Defense’s bulb guide for specifics.)

5. Consider the DVD “An Inconvenient Truth“; in bookstores and video stores everywhere.

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Instead of spending $15, $20 or more on your child’s (or your own) Halloween costume, you can save both money and resources by creating your own. Dig through your closets or browse local resale shops and flea markets for vintage clothes that could make fun costumes. Or put out a request through your local Freecycle or craigslist for used costumes. You’re probably not the only person in your neighborhood to have a few costumes from Halloweens past buried in the back of your closet.

You can also hand out Halloween treats with an Earth-friendly, educational twist. Dog-Eared Publications, for example, sells $2.50 sticker books about endangered animals, forest creatures, marine mammals, sharks and wetlands, among others. Or use Halloween as an opportunity to help others by trick-or-treating for UNICEF or collecting old eyeglasses that can be recycled by Gift of Sight.

For eco-friendly ways to generate a Halloween atmosphere around the house, consider setting out a solar-powered gargoyle, or replacing your regular lightbulbs at home with spooky, mini orange- and black-colored compact fluorescent bulbs. Or charge up some small outdoor solar lanterns during the day, and place them in real or fake pumpkins or luminaria for a renewable ghostly glow at night.

When it comes to decorating your house for Halloween, think reused, recycled or natural whenever you can. HGTV offers a good assortment of homemade costume, pumpkin and decorating projects, but if you want to keep it simple, stick with natural Fall accents: locally-grown pumpkins, gourds or Indian corn, wreaths of colorful Fall leaves or mini-gourds, and beeswax or soy candles in Fall colors.

Finally, take the time in the weeks before to enjoy what nature’s best at in autumn: take a walk through a forest preserve to soak in the fall colors, pick your own apples or pumpkins from a local organic farmer, go for a hay ride or wander through a corn maze. Visit PickYourOwn.org to find the pumpkin patches closest to you.

Also on GO:

Five Super-Simple Steps to Green Trick-or-Treating