[SUBMITTED] Repeal GA291 “Sustainable Forest Management”

[Kay Pacha]

Target • Replacement
Coauthors: Haymarket Riot • Syldis

The World Assembly,

Acknowledging the necessity of combating the disastrous ecological effects of unsustainable logging,

Applauding GA#291’s admirable intentions to address this international crisis,

Disheartened that GA#291’s noble aims are entirely voided by its meandering contents that accumulate into a bloated resolution with a preposterously vast jurisdiction used for bizarre ends,

Alarmed that the GA#291 imposes significant restrictions on the harvest of lumber for commercial use within member states, thereby forcing simple artisans, traders, and other craftsmen who may seek to profit from the fruits of their labor to choose between the following processes:

• Petitioning an international body to approve their wooden media, regardless of the scale of their logging operation,
• Paying for imported lumber that can be more efficiently harvested in non-member states, which may be subject to price-hiking tariffs,
• Paying for lumber that was harvested within member states by large enterprises which possess the administrative resources to comply with GA#291's parameters, thereby creating a exclusionary market that is disadvantageous to individuals who do not fell on behalf of said large enterprises (“EXEMPTS”),

Perplexed by GA#291’s inability to consistently declare its intentions and stipulations, such as its creation of two potentially overlapping types of protected forest zones which are sourced from different authorities within the World Assembly (“CREATES” d. i.; “URGES”),

Confused by GA#291’s endorsement of deforestation for urban development while also expressing concern for the expected consequences of developing previously forested areas ("REQUIRES" c. i.-ii., "BELIEVING" a.-d.),

Baffled by GA#291’s expressed scientific illiteracy, which enables environmentally destructive practices such as:

• Encouraging member states to reforest areas that are destroyed by natural disasters such as wildfires and inundation, thereby resulting in unsustainable ecosystems in which trees that typically germinate in the final phase of ecological succession are denied access to soil replenishment from undergrowth and pioneer microorganisms ("ENCOURAGES"),
• Granting member states and private entities unregulated logging rights to forests that are affected by blights, creating an opportunistic loophole that neuters any intention to contain blights ("ALLOWS"),

Concerned by GA#291's establishment of different standards for each member state ("CREATES" c.), as tailoring and enforcing over 18,000 varying regulatory policies would not only be a gargantuan task for the WAFC to handle, but also an astounding waste of World Assembly resources, and,

Confident that future resolutions will be able to address these concerns and other problems associated with internationally coordinated measures pertaining to foresting and logging,

Repeals GA#291 “Sustainable Forest Management”.

[Wallenburg]

Alarmed that GA#291 contains a clause that violently strangles personal liberties, local economies, and culture itself by:

• Denying artists and artisans the possibility of earning a profit from carpentry products that were not crafted from World Assembly-approved logs (“EXEMPTS”),
• Draconically forbidding individuals from extracting and selling firewood, trees with festive significance, and lumber for personal construction or repair projects to their friends, relatives, or communities (“EXEMPTS”),

This is an incorrect citation. The exemption clause does not issue any proscriptions on these activities. In fact, no clause at all seems to achieve these prescriptions. The chief requirement is the submission of paperwork on the part of a logging project. Unless you can back up these arguments, these look to amount to a Veracity violation.

Perplexed by GA#291’s inability to consistently declare its intentions and stipulations, including mandating the creation of two different types of protected forest zones, confusingly sourced from the authority of two separate bodies, the World Assembly and World Assembly Forest Commission (“CREATES” d. i.; “URGES”),

URGES concerns conservation zones, and CREATES concerns internal WAFC environmental evaluations. This is not confusing or inconsistent.

Baffled by GA#291’s scientific illiteracy that justifies environmentally destructive mandates such as:

• Requiring nations to reforest areas that are destroyed by natural disasters such as wildfires and inundation, thereby inhibiting natural ecological succession, and resulting in unsustainable ecosystems in which trees that normally germinate in the final phase of ecological succession are denied access to soil replenishment from undergrowth and pioneer microorganisms (ENCOURAGES),
• Granting nations and private entities unregulated logging rights to forests that are affected by blights, creating an opportunistic loophole that neuters any intention of containing a blight (ALLOWS),

Encouragements and allowances are not mandates.

Concerned by GA#291's establishment of different standards for each individual nation ("CREATES", c) as the application of standards individually to the over 18,000 member states of the WA would not only be an gargantuan task for the WAFC to handle, but also incredibly impractical and an astounding waste of World Assembly resources,

I find this unconvincing. The WAFC in the course of its duties would likely find individual national road maps for forest conservation to amount to a rounding error in its expenditures.

[Kay Pacha]

This is an incorrect citation. The exemption clause does not issue any proscriptions on these activities. In fact, no clause at all seems to achieve these prescriptions. The chief requirement is the submission of paperwork on the part of a logging project. Unless you can back up these arguments, these look to amount to a Veracity violation.

The exemption clause permits these activities when the wood is used "for personal use and which is not sold or traded for profit." The examples that were provided all involve some sort of profit.
I am willing to edit the line that addresses the submission of paperwork for specificity, but I do not see how this does not translate as "World Assembly-approved logs".

URGES concerns conservation zones, and CREATES concerns internal WAFC environmental evaluations. This is not confusing or inconsistent.

Encouragements and allowances are not mandates.

Noted. These will be corrected and reevaluated, however I do believe that the environmental illiteracy section will not have the strength or integrity of its argument altered by this correction.

I find this unconvincing. The WAFC in the course of its duties would likely find individual national road maps for forest conservation to amount to a rounding error in its expenditures.

This will be taken into consideration.

[Wallenburg]

This is an incorrect citation. The exemption clause does not issue any proscriptions on these activities. In fact, no clause at all seems to achieve these prescriptions. The chief requirement is the submission of paperwork on the part of a logging project. Unless you can back up these arguments, these look to amount to a Veracity violation.

The exemption clause permits these activities when the wood is used "for personal use and which is not sold or traded for profit." The examples that were provided all involve some sort of profit.
I am willing to edit the line that addresses the submission of paperwork for specificity, but I do not see how this does not translate as "World Assembly-approved logs".

My point exactly. The exemption clause exempts certain activities from regulation. It does not impose any restrictions. More broadly, the target imposes no restrictions on what may be done with wood collected from unapproved logging. All the requirements are on the logging itself, not on whomever timber is sold to.

URGES concerns conservation zones, and CREATES concerns internal WAFC environmental evaluations. This is not confusing or inconsistent.

Encouragements and allowances are not mandates.

Noted. These will be corrected and reevaluated, however I do believe that the environmental illiteracy section will not have the strength or integrity of its argument altered by this correction.

If you are concerned that a truthful repeal argument will be unconvincing, then you should consider whether the target actually merits repeal.

[Kay Pacha]

My point exactly. The exemption clause exempts certain activities from regulation. It does not impose any restrictions. More broadly, the target imposes no restrictions on what may be done with wood collected from unapproved logging. All the requirements are on the logging itself, not on whomever timber is sold to.

This section has been revised to coincide with veracity standards:

Alarmed that the GA#291 imposes significant restrictions on the harvest of lumber for commercial use within members, forcing simple artisans, traders, and other craftsmen to choose between undergoing a laborious approval process or otherwise be forced to use lumber harvested by large enterprises, a process which increases monopolization of lumber to those which already have the framework to comply with World Assembly regulations (“EXEMPTS”),

If you are concerned that a truthful repeal argument will be unconvincing, then you should consider whether the target actually merits repeal.

I encourage you to reread the sentence you were responding to.

[The Ice States]

"In principle the Eternal Union would support repeal of this resolution, on the grounds that regulations such as these only serve to harm economic efficiency for the benefit of an environment of little relevance. However, we find that these arguments need to be substantially revised in order to be more persuasive for those nations which do not share our view in this regard."

Alarmed that the GA#291 imposes significant restrictions on the harvest of lumber for commercial use within members, forcing simple artisans, traders, and other craftsmen to choose between undergoing a laborious approval process or otherwise be forced to use lumber harvested by large enterprises, a process which increases monopolization of lumber to those which already have the framework to comply with World Assembly regulations (“EXEMPTS”),

"This argument would be most compelling if you could provide examples of this 'labo[u]rious approval process'. We note that the clause 'REQUIRES' indeed requires a potentially onerous approval process in that permission must be received from an international entity, which in turn must be forwarded to the actual logger by the member nation in question. Describing this in detail would greatly help in making this argument clearer."

Perplexed by GA#291’s inability to consistently declare its intentions and stipulations, including mandating the creation of two different types of protected forest zones, confusingly sourced from the authority of two separate bodies, the World Assembly and World Assembly Forest Commission (“CREATES” d. i.; “URGES”),

"We do not see anything inconsistent within these. The mandate in Creates.di only allows for recommendations to a member nation, while Urges is itself such a recommendation; none of these are derived from the direct authority of the WA. Even so, we see no inconsistency in a law itself reiterating recommendations which may or may not also be made by a committee. We would recommend removal of this argument."

Confused by GA#291’s endorsement of removing forests for development, while at the same time expressing concern for the expected consequences of developing previously forested areas (REQUIRES c. i.-ii., BELIEVING a.-d.),

"This is not a contradiction. The preamble of the target notices the existence of harmful effects from deforestation, and the allowance in Requires implies that such effects may be outweighed by positives. The argument here seems to be that it would only be consistent with acknowledging the negative effects of deforestation to prohibit all of the same, which we do not believe to be the intent of the target nor a compelling argument in a general sense."

Concerned by GA#291's establishment of different standards for each individual nation ("CREATES", c) as the application of standards individually to the over 18,000 member states of the WA would not only be an gargantuan task for the WAFC to handle, but also incredibly impractical and an astounding waste of World Assembly resources,

"There is no reason to believe that the gnomes would be so inefficient as for this to be the case."

"Finally, as Robert Desak likes to point out with our own proposals, the conjunction 'and' should be inserted at the end of the penultimate clause, both of the whole proposal and within lists, so that the text flows as one sentence."

"Thank you for your attention, and we hope that our feedback manifests itself in changes to the draft. I reiterate that the Union would have few reservations in supporting repeal of this target in principle."

~Samuel Rothmann,
Senior WA Representative,
The Eternal Union of Devonia and the Ice States.

[Kay Pacha]

^ Per Ice States' recommendation, I have adjusted "Perplexed" to more precisely identify why the contradictory recommendations harm the logistical competency of the resolution.

The laborious approval process described in "Alarmed" been elaborated upon, as well as a more clear-cut explanation of why alternatives to the process are disadvantageous. However, I would like to push back on the response to "Perplexed". I believe that enabling development of deforested areas contradicts the intentions of the proposal, as rendering deforested tracts of land completely unable to be reforested easily constitutes one of the destructed practices that the target highlights.

I do, however, subscribe to the school of thought that assumes the gnomes are beings which within the binds of spatial-temporal existence, and as such should not be assigned administrative operations that would be unreasonable for an international organization or a government of agnomic humans sapients to carry out with consistency and ease. Of course, these limitations can allow a very slight amount of leeway to account for the magical characteristics of the gnomes employed by the August Body, which are typically limited to passive paraphysical properties such as reduced fall damage, enhanced clairvoyance to expedite bidaily assessments of quantifiable attributes belonging to member- and nonmember-states, superb artisanship to forge appropriate badges to be delivered to member-states within the ±hour in which bidaily assessment occurs, insight into alternate modes of existence in which our most Aghast Qadis may acknowledge the existence of these quantifiable metrics of nation-derived statistics which are indeed impacted by the resolutions that are enacted by our most Amodest Shawties, instead of engaging in active, prepared, and extraphysical spells, incantations, conjurations, wardcraft, artifact-imbuing, runesmithing, invocations, evocations, alchemical brewrightery and consumption of produced products thereof, as well as the manipulation of already-magical standing stones, talismans, idolatrous במות (high places), valleys of dry bones, dimension-traveling Templar monasteries, curious alignments of celestial bodies, mojo dojos, ley lines, witch hazel eyeballs taking care of love, stone cold mamas, proto-civilization middens, volcanic lava floes, geoglyphs, and baleful glades.

With this in mind, I am opening the proposal to last call feedback.

[Simone Republic]

(IC)

"Blowing up the WA's sole resolution related to forestry without a replacement seems like a bad idea."

[Haymarket Riot]

(IC)

"Blowing up the WA's sole resolution related to forestry without a replacement seems like a bad idea."

Replacement is linked in the thread’s first post? We’re collaborating with Bisofeyr.

[Simone Republic]

(IC)

"Blowing up the WA's sole resolution related to forestry without a replacement seems like a bad idea."

Replacement is linked in the thread’s first post? We’re collaborating with Bisofeyr.

(OOC)

Oh I didn't notice it's a collab now. Still oppose at the moment, the replacement is still atrocious but it's gotten better than the last round when the old growth idea was just plain bad.

[Kay Pacha]

Submitted.

[The Ice States]

My apologies to the author/s for not noticing earlier; however I've marked the submitted repeal illegal for this claim,

Requiring member states to reforest areas that are destroyed by natural disasters such as wildfires and inundation, thereby resulting in unsustainable ecosystems in which trees that typically germinate in the final phase of ecological succession are denied access to soil replenishment from undergrowth and pioneer microorganisms ("ENCOURAGES"),

The target does not do this; it only encourages member nations to reforest such areas [CF: [2023] GAS 6, where a repeal was ruled illegal for claiming the target required something it only authorised]. A change "Requiring" -> "Recommending" or similar should be enough to make this legal.

[Kay Pacha]

My apologies to the author/s for not noticing earlier; however I've marked the submitted repeal illegal for this claim,

fixed thanks