COVER STORY
To Mars and Beyond: Freedom of Movement
W
e take for granted that certain human rights should be protected, such as the right to life, the right to freedom from abuse, and the right to freedom from oppression. But the right to freedom of movement is no less fundamental in order for life to flourish. This certainly places an interesting spin on the global citizenship debate, where the right to one’s freedom of movement (and that of one’s family) is sharply circumscribed by the accident of one’s birth. It also raises
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the question of how one feels about the notion of a boundary, be it natural, political, or otherwise. Does one relent to a boundary’s capacity to contain, or does one instead feel inspired by the idea that boundaries are fundamentally there to be breached? If your point of view is global citizenship, freedom of movement, and frictionless travel, the chances are good that, like the narrator of Robert Frost’s famous poem ‘Mending Wall’, you are more inclined toward
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Life, in a very fundamental sense, is movement. From the beating of the human heart to the currents of the ocean, if movement ceases, life stops
