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Comment by madiator | Hacker News Reader

I have mixed feelings about Halloween. On the one hand, it has a great social aspects to it: people get together for carving, there are parties, and kids have so much fun. But the environmental and health sides of it mindboggling. We are completely fine growing so many pumpkins only for them to be carved and thrown away; we buy a ton of costumes that are worn once and go to the landfill; and we buy so many candies a lot of which probably gets thrown (which is probably better than eating them).

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> We are completely fine growing so many pumpkins only for them to be carved and thrown away;

As far as entertainment goes, carving a pumpkin and then letting it quickly compost away is relatively low impact.

You could always argue that the most environmentally friendly option is to do nothing at all and cause nothing to be produced or moved around, but that's hardly a realistic argument. Criticizing every activity that causes something to be consumed, no matter how renewable or compostable, is hardly productive.

Once the environmental arguments get to the point where we're criticizing people for carving a vegetable up but not eating it once per year, it gets hard for people to take seriously.

I hear you. I am not criticizing Halloween, since I take part in doing all of these. I did mention costumes going to landfill though, not just pumpkins.

What I mentioned doesn't have to be taken to extreme to say nothing should be produced and moved around! By that analogy, the only way to save the environment is to stop living.

How do we know what the environment wants? When we are saving it, it’s from our perspective. We are saving our environment. There are plenty of pests that don’t like what we’re up to.

We are important. :)

They are renewable and compostable —both things are often not possible to achieve in other activities.

Those not used can actually be used for baking pumpkin pies —though probably slightly different from regular pie pumpkins, but good enough.

So all things considered, this should not even register vs things like other festivals where there are tons of trash left over.

> They are renewable and compostable —both things are often not possible to achieve in other activities.

I was thinking and wondering if all those 1000s of acres could be used to grow something else, which people could eat and not throw away. :)

But you make a great point. It is better that we carve pumpkins, which are compostable, than use some kind of non-compostable stuff.

People have more than enough food. Where there is a famine you find a government behind it.

Compostable but are they all composted? Where I live, yes; but in other areas they go inside a plastic bag to a landfill where the bag won’t break down for many many years.

I suspect I do far more damage to myself and the environment with how I use computing equipment than I'll ever do on Halloween. It really depends on how you do Halloween.

> We are completely fine growing so many pumpkins only for them to be carved and thrown away

We roast the seeds of any pumpkins we carve and compost the remains. The ones we don't carve get turned into pumpkin pie. We get immense satisfaction from the planning, carving, and displaying of our Jack-o'-lanterns.

> we buy a ton of costumes that are worn once and go to the landfill

We tend not to buy the cheap costumes, but instead assemble our costumes from a combination of costume parts and real items. We have chests full of this stuff and even if we don't use a particular item again, our spooky entity-creations do. The stuff will only end up in the landfill if my inheritors throw them away.

> we buy so many candies a lot of which probably gets thrown (which is probably better than eating them).

I eat all the candy. I give myself permission to eat less-than-great from Halloween to New Years. If I start getting some chub, I work out a little extra. I even did this when I was a body builder (just don't tell any of my trainers).

*Edit: HN-specific markdown...

This is the kind of handwringing that makes me 100% sure climate change is going to wreck us in ways we can barely imagine right now.

Fixing humankind’s damage to the environment is going to take such sweeping societal changes that Halloween costumes and pumpkins shouldn’t even be a blip on our radar.

A time honored practice when carving pumpkins is to roast the seeds in your oven with oil, salt, and pepper. They make a fantastic snack.

Absolutely! And then if the pumpkin is from the jack-o-latern is still good, you can make pumpkin pie.

Can’t a similar thing be said about Christmas, Easter, etc?

People buy a lot of stuff during Christmas, but they get used.

EDIT: I think so.

If I had to guess, probably 80% of the stuff I've received over the years as Christmas gifts ends up getting used very little and then unceremoniously put on a shelf or in the trash. And that may be a generous estimate.

We let our kids wear their costumes for play the rest of the year. They get worn more in a few play sessions than on Halloween.

Also, roasted pumpkin seeds are easy, healthy, and delicious.

I wonder if after growing, harvesting, shipping, etc. a Halloween pumpkin is carbon negative.

Christmas so far outranks Halloween in consumer spending, I can't imagine anyone worrying much about the paltry 10B we will spend in 2021 on Halloween. Christmas will be 100x bigger.

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