States have the right to regulate migration flows and to defend their own frontiers, always guaranteeing the respect due to the dignity of each and every human person—Benedict XVI
The government’s first duty is to protect its people, which implies controlling its borders as an essential function of sovereignty—Ronald Reagan
Borders, boundaries, walls, dividing lines, partitions—surveyors exercise their holy office when imaginary lines composed of spirit are made to assume vestments of matter, where legal fictions are embodied in wood and wire, stone, and steel. Borders are how the Cosmos organizes Self; they separate the good from the bad, the sweet from the sour, the kosher from the treyf and ultimately, the quick from the dead.
Put simply, everything living requires an edge to make it distinct and defensible from, well, every other living thing.
At Every Scale
Every living cell thrives in consequence of a controlling membrane that governs that which is in and that which is out; selective permeability is not merely a good idea, it is survival in practice at microscopic scale and one of the earliest surveys of self for a living thing—i.e., when it comes to essential questions of the Self, ‘where am I?’ is right up there with ‘what am I?’ and ‘who am I?.’
Organs, too, are bordered with membranes either synovial, mucous, cutaneous, or serous—polysyllabic barriers that embrace the body’s manufactories and keep the heart’s blood from smothering the lungs’ respiration, as a well-fenced boundary keeps fattening sheep out of the neighbor’s ripening corn. “Good fences make good (and living) neighbors,” as the cranky poet said.
The skin enclosing each simple separate person is membrane all the way down, border incarnate—Latin incarnatus,” to make flesh”—punctuated by seven, or eight, through-holes, sentineled toll gates that regulate exchange. The accreted persons we call ‘families’ dwell in houses, employees toil in headquarters, crowds coalesce in arenas, and worshipers celebrate together in churches… and each of these a boundaried zone, delineated containers defining associated lives.
Cities and states, polities and reservations, exclusion zones and DMZs and resource regions, all contained and enlivened by infrastructural membranes at scale made sometimes of wood, metal, rock, tangible matter, and sometimes ephemeral, invisible, spiritual in nature, of legal fiction and aspirational wish, of bigoted desire or good intent, but always meant to sharpen the edge that sustains the living.
The smallest and biggest human collectives, from crofts to counties to countries, only function as bodies politic because their borders are legible enough to be located, described, published, and defended: survey before sovereignty, monuments before magistrates.
No profession is more about the verities of civilizational edge than land surveying; every traverse is a biopsy of the body politic, every monument found a pulse taken, every corner set potentially a stitch in time. Judges and lawyers and registrars have roles to play, computers and total stations and sledgehammers are some of the necessary instruments, but land surveyors are the conducting brains of this symphony of bordered life, making a melody you can tap your toes to out of land law and field work, dusty research and mathematical precision, regulated nonsense and sensible accommodations. Good surveys don’t simply draw lines—they redraw conditions of life and establish the selective permeabilities by which humans make exchanges across cultural divides without dissolving into each other.
The Quick & the Dead
It is a truth universally acknowledged that failing biological borders are in want of a doctor’s care: compromised cell walls result in lysis and suppurating death, puncture organ membranes and you don’t get gladsome Kumbaya you get sepsis, breach a being’s skin and you don’t get community, you get infection or spilt blood.
The dead of course no longer care where the borders of Self are drawn; their estates are settled, their arguments adjourned, their quitclaims recorded for eternity. The merely dying though, care desperately. To be “quick” is to be tender, reactive, exquisitely aware of where oneself ends and the other begins. Borders—be they shorelines, cell walls, fence lines, thalwegs or sundry other edges—are how living cultures and communities stave off trampling by history’s heavier boots. The border between the quick and the dead is no literary conceit; it can sometimes be found in a legal description.
We mensores agrarii know quite well that the permeability of the borders we maintain is a function as critical to life as the impassibility we must sometimes enforce. Markets, marriages, migrations, mergers, meetings, mutual assistance, etc. would be impossible without some managed intermittency in membranes. But note that pesky word managed, implying regulation, law, enforcement, guns and gates, and people dead at times. All to provide for and protect the complex mingled lives of those embraced and embordered by the invisible lines we land surveyors define and refine and will into existence.
After all, if personal boundaries aren’t maintained by customs of consent and rule of law it’s not courtship, it’s rape of the innocent. Unlocked doors and wide-open windows are the ruin of families. Unshepherded sheep are the delight of wolves. And open borders are the death of nations.
Angus Stocking is a former licensed land surveyor who has been writing about infrastructure since 2002.