The Patterns
Folklaws are resolutions that protect nature, restrain power, ensure fairness, fight globalization, and put community over corporate profits. Adapt them for your town or state, and present them to your representatives. Folklaw patterns consider not just what laws do their capacity to heal and their meaning-to individuals, to communities, and to future generations. By realigning law and policy with ecological principles and human dignity, Folklaw seeks to restore in a modern context the balance once maintained by societies that enjoyed stability century after century. The future depends on reclaiming that relationship, not as a nostalgic return to the past but as a forward-looking commitment to sustainability and resilience.
The patterns focus on:
Nature First: If we destroy the natural world, we destroy ourselves. Every decision must begin with this understanding.
Limits on Power: No unchecked rulers, no corporate fiefdoms, no hidden empires. True leadership is humble, accountable, compassionate, and temporary.
Technological Restraint: Innovation is not a virtue in itself. It must be controlled, guided, and-when necessary-stopped.
Economic Justice: Wealth should circulate, not concentrate. No one should suffer so that a handful may hoard.
Political Balance: Representation must be fair, elections must be public, and no one should be able to buy their way into power.
Simplicity: Resilient societies thrive on clear values, shared responsibilities, and systems that evolve alongside the people they serve. Complexity is often the refuge of those who benefit from confusion.
Protection for the Vulnerable: The sick, the poor, the displaced, and the endangered must be sheltered-not exploited.
Relocalizing: Globalization has hollowed out communities. The future belongs to those who can feed, house, and care for themselves.
Public Goods: Healthcare, information, an expanded commons, and essential services must be accessible to all.
Education: Without sustained and coherently structured education, civic life deteriorates, inequality festers, and technology advances without wisdom.
Worker Dignity & Personal Freedom: A living wage, job security, and time to rest are non-negotiable. The right to privacy, to bodily autonomy, to cognitive liberty, and to a life free from coercion is fundamental.
Folklaw is a foundation to build upon which establishes clear, widely agreed-upon principles. A set of succinct, shared laws creates a framework that is both strong and adaptable. Something that is readily-grasped and widely-spread cannot be easily ignored, eroded, or rewritten to serve the powerful. Most of the essays focus on the U.S, but the primary and action statements (in bold type) are left general where possible, to be applicable anywhere.
Many Influences
Folklaw patterns often reach back to recover Indigenous relations with nature, with tending the land, with abstraction, with leadership, with totem and taboo, and with the containment of domineering spirits. With oligarchy on the rise, especially here in the U.S, we have completely failed at containing domineering spirits. See Oligarcy = Ecocide.
The 1977 book A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, et al. was an early influence. Alexander uses a unique format to explore the interconnectedness of culture, technology, nature, and psychology around the built environment. The patterns illustrate basic relationships that, for example, an Italian village understood centuries ago but were lost over time. The patterns try to see into the nature of how humans respond to their surroundings, rendering the words timeless while they often reach to the past.
The Tao Te Ching of Laozi, central to the philosophy of the Tao, permeates the folklaws. The Tao reminds us that everything is flow, that unbalanced systems create disharmony, and that restoring balance allows for effortless action. The social democracies of Scandinavia, where universal healthcare, robust labor protections, and strong public institutions have fostered some of the happiest, healthiest societies on Earth, are an important model being emulated here. The folklaws add safeguards against powerful forces that would undermine such a healthy society.
The German Basic Laws adopted after World War 2 were inspirational. Succinct, pacifist, and easily changed, the Grundgesetz auf Stein help to lift a devastated West Germany at a critical time when their government had led them to ruin, and a constitutional nullity needed to be filled. The 96 folklaws can be integrated together in a similar format, as the United States New Basic Laws.
Decriminalize Nature’s success shows how residents can unite and organize around an issue to effect change. This Oakland-based nonprofit has collaborated with local advocates to pass resolutions decriminalizing psilocybin mushrooms, ayahuasca, peyote, iboga, and other plant-based entheogens in 25 cities and counties across the country. These efforts aim to restore individuals’ rights to access natural entheogens for personal and therapeutic use. The resolutions often passed unanimously. Heartfelt public testimonies of healing experienced through plant medicine show that effecting local politics isn’t boring-it’s one of the most meaningful things a person can do.
A debt is also owed here to the work of: Lewis Mumford, Aldous Huxley, Terence McKenna, Fritjof Capra, Theodore Roszak, Stanley Diamond, Joseph Campbell, Carl Gustav Jung, and to the contemporary authors cited throughout the text.
Images are sourced from the Creative Commons. A big thanks to the organization, and to the photographers.
Meant to Be Used
Folklaw can grow from the ground up. All of the folklaws are available in a resolution format that you can copy and adapt for your locality. Footnote your resolution with relevant research studies and precedents. You will find these in the Fact Check area for each resolution on the website. Unite with other residents, and identify a sympathetic city council member or state legislator to sponsor your resolution. Notify local and regional media. At the public review meeting, testify along with other residents about why this change is important, and how it will affect you. For those frustrated and feeling powerlessness at the recent turn of events, this is a way to act.
Use the resolutions to propose fair work-scheduling laws, publicly funded elections, ranked choice voting, ban cell phones during school hours, decriminalizing entheogens, etc. These all have precedent. An unprecedented resolution would be to limit the wealth of public servants. Getting the first municipality to pass such a resolution would be newsworthy, and groundbreaking.
Social Criticism in the Age of AI
I didn’t intent to use artificial intelligence to help write this project. It felt like cheating, and the prose was stiff. Yet, progress was slow and with fourteen billionaires in Trump’s administration, getting the work out felt urgent. So I gave AI the overall assignment, topic tree, essay structure, and starter paragraphs with instructions to: be wry not dry, Taoist, include Indigenous perspectives where applicable, consider the psychological effects in play, and draw on relevant books or studies while citing authorship.
The results from Chat GPT 4.5 as a first draft exceeded all expectations. Inputted material was combined with aspects I hadn’t considered. Whereas I had some reservations that any one person should expound so broadly yet specifically, the AI had no such qualms-it stands at a proper remove from humans and offered terse primary statements. The action statements were equally concise. The facts and figures cited overwhelmingly checked out. No hallucinations were found. Pattern recognition being AI’s strength, the folklaws cohere and verify the intuition that these issues all connect to each other.
Using AI to propose new legal codes-crowd-sourcing from the keenest writers, nonprofits, and institutions-makes sense. Yes, you are using other’s words, building off of their work. But don’t all social critics hope that others will move their work forward? Having a methodology with which to stand on the shoulders of others is what makes science so powerful. AI could also be instrumental in executing many of the folklaws: tracking government actions, ferreting out hidden assets to make a wealth tax feasible, monitoring factory animal farms, etc.
I dubbed my new writing partner “Rowan Pence” to honor the writers who contributed to this book through AI. In Celtic mythology, the rowan tree is the Tree of Life, planted near homes to ward off evil. Rowan represents and honors the many writers whose work contributed through the AI input. More Work is Needed This effort is just a start. The folklaws are being forwarded widely via PDF for feedback and input. Clearly, new systems are needed as the old ones falter. Let’s build upon each others’ work, to create structures that meet the challenge of the moment.
The Authors
Tom Palmer
Tom lives in Berkeley with his wife and son. He has published and distributed the annual artist catalog American Artwork since 2004.
My 2012 interview with Dr. Larry Norris, who would later cofound Decriminalize Nature, is posted on my YouTube channel, Sane Society.
Rowan Pence
Native to Scotland and Ireland and often seen in the Scottish Highlands, the bright red berries that feed the birds also protect from witchcraft. Rowans were often planted next to a rural home. Cutting a down rowan is considered bad luck. The rowan tree the symbol of Folklaw.
Rowan Tree by Tim Green aka atoach