FRAN ALEXANDER: The undoing
We've started a new year and in a few days, we'll have a new president. Political cartoonists usually symbolize each new year as a plump diapered baby and the …
We've started a new year and in a few days, we'll have a new president. Political cartoonists usually symbolize each new year as a plump diapered baby and the …
Maybe it started when a Goodspeed married into our family, or maybe it's just my fascination with names that started my most recent pastime. Or, most likely it…
The best advice for fools is, if you're trapped deep in a hole, stop digging. Of course, that line of action depends totally on recognizing a hole when you're …
It all comes down to this -- who "gets it" and who doesn't? We make the mistake of assuming, of course, that with understanding and education, people will adju…
Seeing the forest for the trees
"We need to care about each other more."
Oh what a tangled web we weave
"Out damned spot! Out I say!"
Well-chose words in obituaries can reveal a lot about the person being memorialized.
With fewer pollutants in the air, there's a chance for a clearer vision of a possible future.
The powers leading the Democratic Party couldn't abide the popular message of Bernie Sanders.
The covid-19 pandemic will, for some, be used as an opportunity to evaluate how humans, nature relate.
When evaluating candidates, how many ask how they stand on important solutions to climate change?
Different values, different viewpoints
Company pressing for development of Markham Hill in Fayetteville could serve community by selling land to someone willing to preserve it.
Columnist Fran Alexander encourages participation in program to plant trees and calls for resistance to Fayetteville plan to build a trail through a nature pre…
Columnist Fran Alexander reflects says trees, so easily and quickly taken down in the name of development, should be respected for the service they provide the…
Columnist Fran Alexander explores one approach to discerning which candidates should be given a shot at national leadership.
Columnist Fran Alexander reacts to a surprising level of attention paid to longtime activists at a recent rally for action on climate change.
Climate change will effect everyone on the planet, so there's little excuse for anyone feeling like he or she achieve anything by getting involved.
"I could not not do something."
"First, do no harm."
"By one estimate, emissions from producing and incinerating plastics could amount to 56 gigatons of carbon -- almost 50 times the annual emissions of all of th…
Decisions, decisions.
"It's not easy being green."
Tommy lived across the street, and Ronnie lived next door. As an only child growing up with those two boys in such proximity, it was more like having brothers …
"Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking, we must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling."
"Hope is something you have to earn."
As state leaders grind away at the sausage at the state Legislature in Little Rock, some stuff gets left out while other stuff gets pushed in. My column three …
Few people realize money is not the main barrier to using the sun that lands on their rooftops as their source of electricity.
Bolt the doors. Hide the children. The Legislature is in session.
Every January I think about the Roman god Janus, for whom the month is named. He is conventionally depicted with two faces, one facing the past, the other the …
For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, "It might have been."
Sometimes the headlines just keep on giving. Traveling over the Thanksgiving holidays meant I missed my newspaper, so all the Arkansas news had to be retrieved…
How chemicals are finding their way into our bodies through various modes of exposure was the topic of my Oct. 16 column. My own awareness of the dangers of ch…
"We are what we eat," that reminder we're told as we develop food choices, needs to be expanded to include the idea that we are also what we drink, breathe and…
Not all ideas we incorporate into our lives work out as grandly as we thought they would at first blush.
As children, at least in my generation, we learned that if you made a promise, you kept it, or a degree of peer scorn was in store. And, if you gave something …
We grow up discovering there are rules governing how, where and when we should act in certain circumstances. And, when the teen years hit, we question and some…
Keeping the faith with our fellow humans requires we assume certain fundamental values to be universal. Surely, for example, the greatest tragedy one could exp…
"We look beyond the river banks and see the future and how the Illinois River will support our lives into the next centuries."
Have you ever had a special place, a little spot where you maybe have gone to put your feet in the creek, to smell the pine trees, to listen to the birds or th…
If I had my way, Fayetteville would stop promoting itself, stop winning national awards and hide from the rest of the world. But, I don't have much of a succes…
Sometimes you just have to do what you have to do, try to change what needs changing and say to hell with the roadblocks.
Sometimes things just get out of hand. The U.S. Forest Service has some housekeeping, or rather forest-keeping, to do, and recently made an effort "to gauge pu…
"These adults, these politicians, these lawmakers, these legislators, they were supposed to protect us. And they didn't."
Successfully raising five sons to adulthood qualifies a mother for sainthood, and my husband's mom certainly earned her heavenly stars. She wisely knew how to …
"There is no right way to do the wrong thing."
It starts in childhood. Not wanting to frighten, but still trying to explain, parents begin gently, if they are smart, to let a child know there is a limit to …
This upside-down world we're living in leaves us questioning not only what we are told, but distrustful that our facts might actually be fallacies. Up is down,…