A look back at all the amazing places and spaces we can go to worldwide.

It’s time to look back at some of the fabulous, luxe, glamped out and gorgeous havens, hotels and resorts we’ve covered in Places & Spaces this year. Be it for for their standard-bearing eco-consciousness and innovative energy-saving, or inimitable style and originality (or, indeed all four), these hotels all merited mentioning. And now they bear ranking as our favorites.

You thought holiday decoration time was over? One more DIY to take you into the new year.

Stop! Don’t toss out those ribbons and cardboard boxes from the holidays. Use them to create a festive 2012 banner for a New Year’s Eve party, somewhere.

ColumnConscious life, hear me roar.

“I want to go ahead of Father Time with a scythe of my own.” - H.G. Wells

My oldest brother, whom I had not talked to or seen in some 10 years, just left my house. For years, I’ve envisioned all the things I wanted to tell him. All that mess that went down when he left, how we all had to pick up the pieces, how I felt bound to hold everyone together and make them see the lighter side of things, but I didn’t.

Our final weekly roundup of stories in 2011.

Here at EcoSalon we’re filled with hope for the new year – specifically:

The New Year resolutions we hope you’re not making in the next few days.

The 2012 we hope you’ll have, specifically, every single one of us.

The 10 news stories of 2011 we hope you didn’t miss.

The 10 quotes about women that we sincerely hope you did miss.

…and in the coming year, we dearly hope we’ve all learned how to seize the moment - because life …

What we’re committing to in the new year. 

Although we believe that every day is the chance to make a change – resolutions, as we all know, tend to get broken – the annual transition in the new year does give us a clean slate. It’s a time of reflection and renewal, the chance to move forward with better intentions, more energy and a new creative spirit.

To celebrate this transition, we gathered New Year’s tips from the EcoSalon team. They’re not resolutions, simply thoughts on living, loving and breathing better in the coming year.

Here’s what we came up with:

ColumnNatalie Chanin’s bi-weekly column, Material Witness, offers a seasoned designer’s perspective on the fashion industry, textile history and what happens when love for community trumps all.

This is a conversation that played out in my head countless times this last week:
“I need to sit down and write the EcoSalon column.”
“The laundry really needs to get done.”
“I NEED to sit down and write the EcoSalon column.”
“Maybe, I should go weed the garden.”
“I NEED to SIT DOWN NOW and write the EcoSalon column.”
“There is that bird pecking around in the yard, I could go stare at it for a while.”

These nutritionally dense foods are packed with fiber.

You might think that slice of bread on your plate is necessary to get the fiber you need to be healthy. Think again. Bread isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and there are plenty of foods that can give you all the fiber you need on a daily basis. These 10 fiber-filled all-stars including avocados, cinnamon, raspberries and eggplant have far more fiber and nutrition per calorie than wheat, and lots of other health benefits, too. Combine as many as you can in one dish, like black beans with oregano, mustard greens, avocados and barley, for one of the healthiest meals of your life.

Gardening stories that had us wanting to intensify our green thumb.

The urban homesteading movement gained serious speed this year, proving that you don’t need to move to the suburbs to enjoy the simple pleasures of growing your own vegetables, raising your own chickens, and starting your own bee colony. And despite some groups’ best efforts to kill the momentum, it doesn’t look like the trend is disappearing anytime soon.