Going green is important, but I’m a big believer in making sure that the eco-friendly practices I adopt are actually beneficial to the environment, and not just a fad the creates the ego-stroking perception that I’m helping the earth. Unfortunately a lot of “organic” practices aren’t really as helpful as people think, and there can be a lot of confusion over what’s actually an effective green practice. Recycling, for example, isn’t the eco-friendly silver bullet most people believe it to be. Corn-based biofuel is just as bad for our air and worse for our economy than oil, and commercially grown organic vegetables decrease the productivity of land and still have to be transported, driving up food costs and polluting the air. If you mention any of these facts to overenthusiastic noobs in the green movement, they’ll get really upset and call you a neocon. Like any aspect of our society, ignorance is the biggest thing hampering the transition to an Earth-friendly lifestyle.

This Christmas season I’ve started to see a lot of ads for “Green Christmas” practices. Christmas trees have garnered a lot of attention, and it’s surprising to see how well untrue ideas can be effectively marketed as greener so that sellers can make money and buyers can feel good about themselves. Potted Christmas trees are all the rage. But here’s the question: what do you do with it after the season? Unless your apartment has room for a Douglas Fir, it’s the same thing as just buying a cut tree and letting that one die too.

It’s not just the sales folks. A hippie I know sent out an e-mail telling everyone that cutting down trees for the holiday season was an assault on the environment, leading to deforestation and thus increasing the amount of carbon in the air. /headdesk. Come on. Really? Really?

A little known fact is that a Christmas tree farm is one of the most effective methods out there for getting carbon out of our air. Young, vigorous, growing trees soak up the carbon. As trees move past their prime, they actually start to release it back into the environment. Christmas tree farms do nothing but churn young, healthy trees through the land. And after the season is over, it’s easy to recycle the tree as mulch. There’s hard science backing this up, which is why it’s important to judiciously log in our forests. Clear-cutting is obviously destructive and harmful, but a well-groomed forest with just enough old growth and plenty of young trees will fix carbon and help us avoid fires, which belch carbon into the air.

So don’t feel guilty about buying that cut tree. You’re doing the earth a favor. And there are plenty of other ways that you can green your Christmas. Don’t buy wrapping paper. Try to think of ways to reuse existing materials for more creative gift presentation. My favorite type wrapping — the Sunday comics page — is now unfortunately extinct to me, but I still manage to find other fun things to use. Scraps of cloth can be sewn into reusable gift bags. Sturdy boxes can be reused again and again. As a challenge to myself, I’m going to attempt to make sure that at least half of what I give as gifts this Christmas are used or refashioned items, and nothing that I use for gift wrap will be new. I won’t tell anyone explicitly what I’m doing, because the only thing worse than a hippie is a preachy hippie. If somebody guesses or asks, bonus points for them. But I figure the best way to tell someone I care about them is to give them a gift without harming them or their children in the long run, and it’s not difficult. In fact, I’m happy about the creativity it’s forcing me to use.