There is a law that no parliament passed, no king decreed, and no majority voted into being. It was here before any of us, and it will be here after every government now standing has passed away. We call it the Law of the Earth: natural law, written down as plainly as we can manage.
The Law of the Earth is not an invention. It is a discovery, in the same way that geometry is a discovery. Pythagoras did not make his theorem true; he found that it was. The Earth Party's role is simply to collate and present what honest reasoning uncovers, so that anyone can read it, test it, and hold it up against the rules they are asked to obey.
The Law is found.
The Blueprint is built.
These are two different kinds of work, and it matters that they stay separate. The Law of the Earth is fixed; it never changes, because reality does not change to suit us. The Blueprint for a Mature Civilization is a human plan: a strategy for bringing our world back into alignment with that Law, and open to revision as we learn. The first step of the Blueprint is simply to recognize the Law, which is why you may arrive here from either direction.
Core, Mantle, and Crust
The Law is arranged like the Earth itself, in three layers, each one resting on the one beneath it.
Core
The basic mechanics
Benign sovereignty, legitimate and illegitimate force, rationality, and upholdment. The irreducible workings of how the Law operates.
Mantle
Derived from the core
Principles easily and logically deduced from the core, set out as clear lists: human rights, animal rights, what may not be done to the land.
Crust
Local rulemaking
Jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction detail, written by each village, township, and city. It must always be consistent with the core.
An analogy helps. In the United States, ordinary laws must conform to the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights spells out, in plain enumerated form, protections that are meant to be timeless. The core is something like the Constitution, the mantle something like the Bill of Rights, and the crust something like local statute. The analogy is imperfect in one important way: the Constitution was still written and passed by people. The core of the Law of the Earth is not passed by anyone. It is discovered.
That is why this site publishes only the core and the mantle. The crust belongs to each community to work out for itself, and any crust that contradicts the core is not law at all.
Two Ways to Read It
Different minds absorb things differently, so the Law will be presented in two ways. For straight-down-to-business readers, the full text of the core and mantle will live on a single page: one long, continuous document you can read straight through or copy in one motion. For visual readers, the storybook presents the Law one concept at a time, one idea per book spread, with the official text on the left page and commentary on the right.
- StorybookCore Axiom 1: Benign SovereigntyThe innermost root from which every principle emanatesOpen the book
- Full TextThe Full Law, on One PageBeing finalized, core axiom by core axiomComing