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More Than Just A River

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Ed. note: Jeremy Rosenberg returns today to KCET.org's web pages. Once the site's Think Tank LA blogger, he now becomes Departures' Lead Columnist.

On Mondays, Rosenberg will post his reflections about past, present and future Departures content and about how the series' subjects and issues relate to contemporary themes and currents in metropolitan Los Angeles and beyond.

On Thursdays, Rosenberg will curate a new Departures feature called, "Arrival Stories."

To say that KCET.org Departures: L.A. River is just about, you know, the L.A. River is like saying that Apocalypse Now is a film just about the Nung.

Or that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a book just about the Mississippi.

Or Thoreau's Walden is just about a pond.

[Click the links in the story below to access Departures video and audio content.]

What, then, is Departures: L,A. Riverabout?

Departures: L.A. River is about flow.

Departures: L.A. River is about a metropolis' history -- and prehistory.

Departures: L.A. Riveris about agriculture, industrialization and post-industrialization.

Departures: L.A. River is about ethnicity, immigration, exodus and identity.

Departures: L.A. River is about the environment and environmental justice, society and social justice and civil and criminal justice.

Departures: L.A. River is about poetry and politics.

Departures: L.A. River is about visual art and architecture.

Departures: L.A. River is about urban planning - from modern master planning to eschewing an Olmsted.

Departures: L.A. River is about engineering.

Departures: L.A. River is about Mother Nature and Uncle Sam -- and Tia Chucha.

Departures: L.A. River is about wealth and poverty.

Departures: L.A. River is about homelessness.

Departures: L.A. River is about geography.

Departures: L.A. River is about neighborhoods.

Departures: L.A.River is about gangbanging, and reasons not to.

Departures: L.A. River is about driving single passenger cars and trucks, and reasons not to.

Departures: L.A. River is about pocket parks and active parks and passive parks.

Departures: L.A. River is about signs on bridges, and shadows below them.

Departures: L.A. River is about activists and bureaucrats and politicians and more politicians.

Departures: L.A. River is about tranquility and audacity.

Departures: L.A. River is about priorities changing with time.

Departures: L.A. River is about symptoms and cures, causes and effects.

Departures: L.A. River is about watersheds and ichthyology and fluvial geomorphology.

Departures: L.A. River is about the snowy egret and the great egret and blue herons, sandpipers, cormorants and terns.

Departures: L.A. River is about all of us.

Departures: L.A. River is about Los Angeles.

See you Thursday.

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