9 Ways Witches Impact the Environment

This Hallowe’en season, what can we learn from witches about how to combat climate change?

Image by Hugo Hercer from Pixabay

Anyone who’s watched David Attenborough’s latest documentary, A Life on Our Planet, knows that climate change is scary. It will cause crops to die, animals to lose their habitats and millions of people will have to leave their homes. To beat it we need something scarier than climate change: witches. Witches are unarguably spooky: they are the number one adult Hallowe’en costume. Luckily they also do some pretty environmentally friendly things.

1. Pointed hats and cloaks

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

Witches are rarely seen without their signature pointed hats. They’re also often portrayed wearing lots of shawls and long, black cloaks. Wearing warm clothes, like a thick jumper or a witch’s cloak, and turning down the thermostat is one of the best small household changes to save energy.

This makes such a difference because heating is the biggest usage of energy in the home. The environmental cost of air conditioners is well-known, but even in warm, humid areas heating a home uses more energy over a year than cooling it. Witches get around this by wrapping up warm.

2. Broom

Image by Sofia Cristina Córdova Valladares from Pixabay

Lots of forms of modern transport are very bad for the environment, but witches have a way around this. Unlike planes, which emit huge amounts of CO2 per flight, it doesn’t appear that brooms are very polluting. It’s not clear how they stay in the air, but they certainly don’t seem to emit any greenhouse gases.

A broom is also the witch’s only mode of transport and replaces cars and trains, which are largely powered by fossil fuels and contribute a large proportion of global emissions. Until the rest of us learn how to make household cleaning equipment hover off the ground, we’ll have to stick to reducing our transport use and swapping to greener transport options…