"What can 250 feet on either side do for a river?" This question was put to me by a student when I suggested that our group use the Los Angeles River (The LA River) as a case study in our political ecology course. I first became intrigued with the river during a course on neighborhood landscapes in the spring of 2005. The Los Angeles River is 51 miles, more than half of its length (32 miles) runs through the City of Los Angeles. As part of the neighborhoods course, we spent time in Chatsworth, CA, a community bisected by the upper reaches of the river, part channelized, part in its natural river bed. The LA River Revitalization Master Plan is what some folks consider to be the culmination of decades of nature-culture-politics wars to restore ecological function to the channelized portions of the river. The Master Plan calls for the laying back off 250 feet of property on either side of the river and in five places, to make quarter-mile city-water intersections. Within the