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 efficiency 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.