I’ve spent the past two days holed up at Awakened Aesthetic HQ – a.k.a. my house.  Why?  Because it’s snowing! It’s snowing a lot, actually…especially for Seattle.  It’s also sleeting, and freezing raining, and snowing some more.  My non-blog office has been closed for the past two days, and when I step outside I’m met [...]

Image via Fortaguada Animal rights supporters will be excited to hear that the West Hollywood City Council has voted to ban the sale of fur within its city limits. The ban was adopted on September 20 and was supposed to be enacted on June 12, but there was a little problem: the fur industry’s main [...]

This guest post is written by Haley Mitchell, who I visited earlier this year in her home state of Mississippi. Living in rural Mississippi, in the heart of the Delta, is one of the easiest excuses I can think of for someone to ignore the ethics of shopping, but Haley finds a way. Choosing to [...]

Look at this face. How can you not love this face? His name (her name?) is Nyctibatrachus gavi, or the Gavi night frog, and he’s one of the dozen new frog species recently found in India. I think he’s pretty excited to make his debut, don’t you? “Night frogs are a group endemic to India [...]

The Awakened Aesthetic team is absolutely exhausted. We spent yesterday evening occupying Seattle. As Occupy Wall Street issues its first official declaration and Occupy Seattle finds its footing, we choose to support the movement that was inspired by the Arab Spring, a movement that is growing in every city, all over the country – even [...]

Some ethical shopping decisions are easy: buying organic produce is easily better than the GMO, pesticide-filled stuff, and taking the bus to work is better for the earth than driving your car every day. Other ethical decisions are harder. The hardest, for me, is deciding what percentage of my purchases should be local, and what [...]

We love natural clothes, but what about the laundry? Check out our top three favorite ways to wash (& share your own!).

My city’s a ghost town, and so is the internet. Everyone in the US seems to be out celebrating their three-day weekend, and I’ve spent most of my weekend lounging around the house. For those of you at home (or out!) looking for a bit of brain entertainment (braintertainment?) I’ve compiled a few news articles [...]

Sometimes, when it’s early in the morning and I’m playing on Etsy, half asleep, I get really confused by some of the things people sell…and how those things manage to make it into Treasuries. *yawns, sips coffee* “…is that…wood for sale? Maybe it’s a photograph of wood. Like, an artistic photograph…” *clicks image, reads description* [...]

All right, stop, Collaborate and listen Jen is back with a brand new… Link love post? Photo by Matthew Piatt Robin Shreeves talks Fiestaware at Mother Nature Network. I love Fiestaware, and am glad to see that it is conscious about conservation, and that Robin found options to purchase much of her “new” dinnerware second-hand. [...]