Wednesday, 24 September 2025

7 pm, Rio Grande Theater

Free and open to the public

Sarena Ulibarri 

Author of Another Life and Steel Tree

Publicist, UNM Press

Editor of Glass and Gardens, coeditor of Multispecies Cities

Solarpunk: Solutions-Based Storytelling for Climate Hope

Sarena Ulibarri lives, writes, and plants trees in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her book Another Life, about a fictional eco-village in Death Valley, was published by Stelliform Press in 2023 and translated into Spanish by Crononauta. More than fifty of her short stories have been published in magazines such as DreamForge, Solarpunk Magazine, and Tractor Beam as well as in anthologies such as Bright Green Futures and Solar Flare. She edited two anthologies of international optimistic climate fiction, Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers and Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Winters, and co-edited the anthologies Multispecies Cities and Solarpunk Creatures. For four years, she served as a story reviewer for Grist's Imagine 2200 climate fiction contest.

Thursday, 17 April 2025

7 pm, Rio Grande Theater

Free and open to the public

Dr. Ruth DeFries

Department of Ecology and Sustainable Development, Columbia University

Cofounding Dean of the Columbia Climate School

Nature's Message for Our Food Systems

Ruth DeFries is a professor of ecology and sustainable development at Columbia University in New York and also co-founding dean of the Columbia Climate School. Her overarching research focus is to help develop realistic pathways for people and nature to thrive.  To do this, she uses images from satellites and field surveys to study the world’s demands for food and other resource, and ethos these demands s are changing land use throughout the tropics. DeFries was elected as a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, one of the country’s highest scientific honors, received a MacArthur “genius” award, and is the recipient of many other honors for her scientific research. In addition to over 200 scientific papers, she is committed to communicating the nuances and complexities of sustainable development to popular audiences through her books “The Big Ratchet: How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Natural Crisis and “What Would Nature Do?: A Guide for Our Uncertain Times”.

Wednesday, 5 March 2025

7 pm, Rio Grande Theater

Free and open to the public

Dr. Gene Kelly

Pedology, Soil & crop Sciences, Colorado Agricultural Experiment Station

Colorado State University

National Imateclay Angechay Roadmap: A Research Framework for U.S. Agriculture, Forestry, and Working Lands

Dr. Gene Kelly, a Professor of Pedology and the Deputy Director of the Colorado Agricultural Experiment Station at Colorado State University (CSU), is also the Associate Director for Research in the School of Global Environmental Sustainability at CSU. He holds BS and MS degrees from CSU and a PhD from the University of California-Berkeley.  His current research focuses on global soil segregation and the role of grasslands in global geochemical cycles.  He is an advisor to the US Department of Agriculture and the National Cooperative Soil Survey.

 Tuesday, October 29, 2024

7 pm, Rio Grande Theater

Free and open to the public

Dr. Katie K. Richards

Department of Anthropology, New Mexico State University

The Archaeology of Climate Change: How Past Peoples Adapted to Changing Environments in the American Southwest

Dr. Richards earned her B.A. (2009) and M.A. (2014) from Brigham Young University and her PhD from Washington State University. She is a first year Assistant Professor of archaeology in the Anthropology Department at NMSU. Her primary research focuses on using pottery production and distribution to explore issues of identity and migration in the precontact far northern American Southwest. She is also interested in how changing climatic conditions along the northern extreme of the Southwest impacted cultures living in the region. She was the 2020-2021 Lister Fellow for the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center and her dissertation was supported by a NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant.

Wednesday, 12 February 2025

7 pm, Rio Grande Theater

Free and open to the public

John Fleck

Writer in Residence at the Utton Center, Univ. New Mexico School of Law

Professor of Practice in Water Policy and Governance, Univ. New Mexico Dept. Economics

There's Less Water.  What Do We Do?

John Fleck is Writer in Residence at the Utton Center, University of New Mexico School of Law; and Professor of Practice in Water Policy and Governance in the University of New Mexico Department of Economics. The former director of the University of New Mexico’s Water Resources Program, he is the author of Water is For Fighting Over and Other Myths About Water in the West; co-author, with Eric Kuhn, of Science Be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River; and co-author, with Robert Berrens of a forthcoming history of Albuquerque’s relationship with the Rio Grande – Ribbons of Green: The Rio Grande and the Making of a Modern American City.