Territory is more than an area defined by boundaries. As this article shows, the geometry of territory is not two-dimensional. The calculations often involve complex power relationships and conflict. Clearly defined boundaries are thought to promote peace: “Good fences make good neighbors…” but this notion is usually the impetus for war. Territorial violations and disputes are used as a means to justify killing. I found it interesting that the word territory was derived from terra=land nourishment, and terrere=warning. Therefore territory is literally a place of sustenance sustained by violence. There is an important yet blurry distinction between public and private land. According to the ‘blue bird theory of territoriality’: nature necessitates the human ownership of the natural world just as nature necessitates that creatures reproduce and consume resources. Even though territory may be a fundamental and universal need (to obtain and control resources for survival), thinking about it this way limits the scope of our understanding. However, by dismissing the ‘blue bird theory’ all together, the author limits territory as a phenomenon specific to humans. On this point I disagree. It might be illuminating to analyze the territories of other species to better understand our own divisions. All living things, plants included, are fighting for control and access to resources. There are divisions between these beings because of their struggle to survive geographically. Perhaps the ways these beings communicate the boarders of their territories are not so different from our own. However, applying science to social systems commonly results in heinous abuses of power. For example: natural selection + social hierarchy = genocide. There is not one underlying meaning of the word ‘territory’ so it would be foolish to search for one theory to encompass all social divisions, but it might be interesting… Territories are created for control. Strategies are employed to make the powerful more powerful. For instance the North American Free Trade Agreement has successfully created a power asymmetry between U.S. multi-national corporations and foreign labor. Now foreign lands that were once self-sustaining are dependent on U.S. companies for sustenance. There is a quote from this article on the topic of international territory that made me feel embarrassed to be human. “…The capacity to conceive of the entire planet as a single place carved up into mutually exclusive, putatively sovereign states that constitute ‘the international.’” Whether this desire to mediate our environment is intrinsic or not, it is unquestionably futile. Humans have conquered and colonized the earth in the name of manifest destiny, but human borders only command humanity not Nature. The infinite interpretations of territory create tangled power structures surrounding boarders. After reading this article, the distinctions between access and exclusion are more evident than before. Even the most mundane activities have traces of these limitations. These boundaries are not necessarily part of the physical infrastructure of our surroundings but they are ingrained in our social infrastructure as tradition. The author describes our simultaneous occupation of many overlapping territories nested in one another. Using words like micro-territories to describe everyday places and macro-territories to describe global politics. This got me thinking about the infinite ways space can be divided and categorized into territories: specifically configurations that have little relevance to the domain of human power. For instance there are sub-micro-territories: a dust mite dining in a box of cereal, an amoeba basking on an island of pond scum, a virus cruising down the lymph node superhighway. On the other end there are super-macro-territories: the orbits of the planets, constellations of galaxies, and the inescapable suction of a black hole. These territories may seem irrelevant because they are beyond human control… and maybe they are too abstract to be useful, but these extremely large and small phenomena do have very real implications in our everyday lives. Which brings to question the whole notion of control…