The automation of forest cleaning presupposes principles for choosing those trees that ought to be taken away and those that shall be left standing. In this paper, which is a report on a work in progress, the question is raised whether those principles can be structured as a combination of a normative system and a utility function. Of special interest is the possibility that the agent system can evaluate the e¢ ciency of the normative system and the utility function and, furthermore, suggest improvements of them. Earlier works on norms and norm-regulation of agent systems that the author has been involved in are used to elucidate the problem area discussed in the paper.