Ribbons of Green

“An exhaustive look at the people and policies that made the city of Albuquerque, where the Rio Grande is both the backbone and the bane of the city. Fleck and Berrens describe in detail how people used the river to build this modern city in the desert Southwest.” – Kathleen Kambic, coauthor of The Design Competition in Landscape Architecture: Pedagogy and Practice“Ribbons of Green tells the evolving story of how people interact with and influence the Middle Rio Grande Valley, highlighting the complexities and the ways in which various communities came together to solve ecological challenges.” – Mary Harner, professor of biology at the University of Nebraska at Kearney“Envisioning the Rio Grande’s future in a warming world means reckoning with the past. Fleck and Berrens delve into the historic systems and rules that shape the river as it flows—and sometimes dries—through Albuquerque today. And they help us all consider the collective action river governance requires.” – Laura Paskus, author of At the Precipice: New Mexico’s Changing Climate

John Fleck is a writer in residence at the Utton Transboundary Resources Center at the University of New Mexico School of Law and a professor of practice in water policy and governance by letter of academic title in the Department of Economics at the University of New Mexico. From 2016 to 2021, he served as the director of the University of New Mexico’s Water Resources Program. He has been writing about water in the West since the 1980s and is the author of Water Is for Fighting Over: And Other Myths about Water in the West and the coauthor (with Eric Kuhn) of Science Be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River.

Robert P. Berrens is an environmental economist and a Regents Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of New Mexico. He is also the former coeditor of Contemporary Economic Policy and the associate editor of Water Resources Research. His research interests include water resources, ecosystem services, biodiversity and endangered species, forest resources, wildfire risk reduction, climate change, and environmental policy. He is a coauthor of Energy Use in Bitcoin Mining: The Environmental Impact of Cryptocurrencies.