We roamed the Garden of Eden, living instinctively, unaware of moral choices, the knowledge of good and evil as yet undreamt of. At one with the animals living around us, an undivided part of creation, free and innocent.

But that innocence faded with each new step forward, each bite of the apple, as we slowly learnt to mould the world around us, with tools, language, ideas and weapons. Almost without knowing it, each step was also taking on another level of reponsibility for the world we now manipulated.

As a child learns to look after itself and then others, we need to accept that freedom and responsibility are not just two faces of the same coin, nor even that that particular coin is the only true wealth there is. Each of us must learn how our own freedom and responsibility are the two weights hanging in the scales of justice. We must be balanced both as individuals and as a society.

In some ways, we are like young children having discovered that moving the weights makes the balance arm swing, and entranced by the motion, are oblivious to the havoc we are creating in the scalepans, until something either breaks or falls out of one of the pans with a loud crash, ever the herald of tears - and then the tantrums of war.

Somewhere along the way, as the richness of the life we wrought from the land increased, it became easier, even honorable, to take from another rather than make for yourself. The arrogance of those who took grew with each new conquest, spread from individual to tribe, on to city and kingdom. Laws were formed to enshrine this arrogance - giving to mere passing mortals the ownership of the Earth itself, of Gaia, mother of all.

Gaia who is everything you are, whose body is your body (for without her you do not exist). Gaia who was here ages before your great-great- grandmother drew breath, whose bosom will enfold your great-great-grandchildren's coffins. She who was, is and will be - this our possession? Our chattel to treat as we will?

When laws, and most especially the morals used to justify them, can be so hypocritical, so manifestly immoral as to allow personal ownership of something which no human created, more, which not one single living thing can exist without - to assert that the sole source of our existence, our very right to life, is mere private property, and physically enforce this to the extent that most people are born bereft of our common inheritance, which condemns them to choose between death or becoming the property of those who own their right to live. That these laws can embrace countless other evils, such as slavery, warfare, poverty and the starvation of many amidst plenty, surely proves both their purpose and their true origin. Born from warfare and privilege, such laws were created to preserve private ownership of the planet, and to protect the privileged few who benefit from the continuance of this enormous injustice.

Justice too is a balance of nature, no less complex or fragile than any ecosystem, and again one who's tendency to reach equilibrium we can overturn at our will, but must always eventually reap the consequences.

We have travelled a long and bloody road from the Garden of Eden, so far that looking back we barely remember it, like some long-lost childhood afternoon, now just a faint memory of a memory, a faded fable gathering dust in the corners of our attention. Yet on that journey we have learnt so much - to go forward it is not necessary (or indeed possible) to go back, but we can and must, reconsider the way we are travelling.