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By Root 464 0

a male bird—a vireo, for example—sings his belligerent song at another male vireo that approaches his neck of the woods, he is singing about family. It’s a little bit like grumbling over the handsome delivery person who’s getting too friendly with your spouse; a lot like coming with a crowbar after an intruder at your child’s bedroom window in the night; and nothing at all like a NO TRESPASSING sign. The vireo doesn’t waste his breath on the groundhogs gathering chestnuts under his nose, or the walnut trees using the sunlight to make their food, the grubs churning leaves into soil, the browsing deer, or even other birds that come to glean seeds that are useless to a vireo’s children. Worm-eating birds have no truck with seedeaters; small-seed eaters ignore big-seed eaters. This is the marvelous construct of “niche,” the very particular way an organism uses its habitat, and it allows for an almost incomprehensible degree of peaceful coexistence. Choose a cubic foot of earth, about anywhere that isn’t paved; look closely enough, and you’ll find that thousands of different kinds of living things are sharing that place, each one merrily surviving on something its neighbors couldn’t use for all the tea in China. I’m told that nine-tenths of human law is about possession. But it seems to me we don’t know the first thing about it.

It did not take me long in the desert to realize I was thinking like a person, and on that score was deeply outnumbered. My neighbors weren’t into the idea of private property, and weren’t interested in learning about it, either. As Kafka frankly put it, when it’s you against the world, bet on the world.

So I dispensed with lordship, and went for territoriality. I turned a realistic eye on my needs. I don’t really have to have hollyhocks outside my door. But I’d like some tomatoes and eggplants. Oak-leaf lettuce on crisp fall days, and in the spring green beans and snowpeas. Maybe a little bed of snapdragons. It wouldn’t take much. Since I had no plans to raise a huge brood, sixty square feet or so of garden space would serve me very well.

I revised my blueprints and looked hard at Pueblo architecture, which shuns the monumental for the more enduring value of blending in. The Pueblo, as I understand their way of life, seem to be more territorial than proprietary, and they’ve lived in the desert for eight centuries. Between the javelinas and me it had come down to poison darts in about eight days. Enough with that.

I settled on a fairly ancient design. The wings of my house enfold a smallish courtyard. My territorial vireo song is a block wall, eight feet high. Inside the courtyard I grow a vegetable garden, a few fruit trees, and a bright flag of flowerbed that changes its colors every season. The acres that lie beyond the wall I have left to cactus and mesquite bramble, and the appetites that rise to its sharp occasion.

Life is easier since I abdicated the throne. What a relief, to relinquish ownership of unownable things. Engels remarked at the end of his treatise that the outgrowth of property has become so unmanageable that “the human mind stands bewildered in the presence of its own creation.” But he continues on a hopeful note: “The time which has passed since civilization began is but a fragment of the past duration of man’s existence; and but a fragment of the ages yet to come….A mere property career is not the final destiny of mankind.”

Indeed. We’re striving hard to get beyond mere property career around here. I’ve quit with the Adenium obesum, and taken to leaving out table scraps for the pigs. I toss, they eat. I find, now that I’m not engaged in the project of despising them, they are rather a hoot to watch. On tiny hooves as preposterous as high-heeled pumps on a pirate, they come mincing up the path. They feel their way through the world with flattened, prehensile snoots that flare like a suction-cup dart, and swivel about for input like radar dishes. When mildly aroused (which is as far as it goes, in the emotional color scheme of the javelina), their spiky fur levitates into a