Boundaries -

Natural and Manmade

A map of Pennsylvania and neighboring states, with the Schuylkill Watershed outlined

Boundary: a limit, a bound, anything marking a limit. From Low Latin bunnarium, a field with limits.

Reference: Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary.

Everything has limits, boundaries, but some are natural and others are artificial. The boundaries of our political jurisdictions are artifical, straight, and rigid. On the other hand the boundaries of the watershed are curved and natural. They are fluid and constantly shift through time, as the quote suggests.
This isn't just true in the physical sense, but also in how processes work in natural systems as compared to those in artificial ones. Man-made systems (at least Western ones!) are often rigid and inflexible, while natural systems have resiliency and tend toward balance. Perhaps that rigid, putting-everything-in-boxes phase of our civilization is coming to end, as we come to understand the inter-relatedness of everything through the study of ecology. Not to mention the insights we gain from the curiously illogical yet seemingly accurate predictions of theories such as quantum mechanics and fuzzy logic.
But even if we are coming to appreciate that nature works in curves and probabilities, we still have to live with the rigid structures we have defined for ourselves. Nothing illustrates those structures better than the science of cartography - everything measured and tallied and computed and graphed on paper. Here are links related to maps and mapmaking:

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