You grow your own tomatoes, harvest your own herbs, and cultivate a few fruit trees (or you wish you did). Why then would you buy meat from a butcher?

More and more people are taking the locavore approach to getting their own meat, including hunting local deer for venison. Though it may seem extreme to some folks, hunting and dressing your own deer, boar, turkey or other game has been a way of life for, oh, thousands of years. And you can't get much more free-range than a wild animal.

Where I live (in the country north of New York City), the air these days is filled with the sound of deer rifles. The animals are pests, wiping out forests and gardens alike, so taking out Bambi's mom seems like green living at its finest. In fact, I feel a bit foolish for serving a store-bought turkey this Thursday, since my backyard is home to a family of turkeys.

Here's wishing you and your family a happy, healthy and local Thanksgiving.

LED Christmas lights use just 10 percent of the energy of incandescents, last for some 50,000 hours, and are cooler and safer than older incandescent lights. So why are you hanging onto those old Christmas lights?

Perhaps the best news of all is this: HolidayLEDs.com will take your old lights, recycle them, and give you a coupon for 15 percent off any LED lights they sell. So now you can save money on saving money.

That should make your Yuletide bright.

A recent article in the New Yorker reviews Superfreakonomics, the latest book by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, authors of the best-selling Freakonomics.

Reviewer Elizabeth Kolbert makes the Steves sound like glib amateurs who are simply out of their depth. When they assert the solution to global warming lies at the end of an eighteen-mile-long hose that would shoot sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, thereby mimicking the cooling effects of a volcanic eruption, Kolbert coolly rips them a new one: "Though climate change is a grave problem, Levitt and Dubner treat it mainly as an opportunity to show how clever they are."

And with a title like SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance, it's hard to believe that the two authors are more interested in serious debate than in provocative soapboxing.

Massive geoengineering projects like the ones they propose have a pathetic track record, and Kolbert delivers a knockout punch to the two econo-hacks: "To be skeptical of climate models and credulous about things like carbon-eating trees and cloudmaking machinery and hoses that shoot sulfur into the sky is to replace a faith in science with a belief in science fiction."

Brava, Kolbert!

I'm inclined to agree with folks who believe it just ain't the holidays without a big ol' Christmas tree hogging all the space in your living room. Putting presents around the Solstice branch doesn't really cut it for me.

Then again, chopping down a beautiful, living tree doesn't seem all that eco-sensitive, either. Is it possible to have a sustainable holiday and a traditional tree? Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as a green Christmas tree.