Ribbons of Green The Rio Grande and the Making of Modern Albuquerque

The first combined social and ecological look at how institutions in New Mexico intentionally built the Rio Grande Valley through the heart of Albuquerque to create “natural” corridors of green spaces in a modern American city.

Dry one year, overflowing the next, the Rio Grande has sustained its arid valley for millennia. In Ribbons of Green, John Fleck and Robert P. Berrens seek to understand twenty-first-century Albuquerque’s relationship with the Rio Grande by exploring the social and ecological interactions that describe how this high-desert city developed astride a capricious river. In every phase of the Duke City’s history, living with the Rio Grande posed problems that required collective action by its stakeholders to irrigate, build river crossings, drain the valley’s floor, and protect residents from flooding.

These collective decisions ultimately changed the course of the river, resulting in intentionally designed “ribbons of green” that dominate today’s cityscape. The Rio Grande in turn altered the collective psyche of Albuquerque. For many residents, the city’s bosque is their only interaction with nature, but these green corridors are very much a human creation. Ribbons of Green explores how Albuquerque built its environment to create a valley floor that its residents have come to adore and how, in a climate-altered world, we might keep it.

A former science journalist, 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.