THE ECOLOGICAL ANNEX — The empire’s delegation preparing for the UN biodiversity meeting has encountered an obstacle to its proposed habitat protection program: the application asks what lives there.
The delegation’s preferred answer, “nothing unusual,” has proved difficult to reconcile with its request for urgent species conservation.
“We are asking the international community to protect a vulnerable population,” said chief naturalist Dr. Ada Scale. “We would simply prefer the community not to learn which population, where it is, or why it requires a chauffeured car.”
The empire’s submission originally identified its habitat as an interconnected network of wetlands, warm rock formations, and discreetly ventilated conference facilities. A later draft removed the conference facilities on legal advice. A third restored them after the Overlord asked whether the sauna would still qualify.
The disagreement has exposed a division within reptilian conservation policy. Field biologists want functioning ecosystems. Senior officials want the estate surrounding each of their residences recognized as indispensable to planetary survival.
One governor submitted an eighteen-hole golf course as a migration corridor. Asked which species migrated through it, his office supplied a list of regular members.
Scale has urged the delegation to concentrate on less negotiable requirements: clean water, viable prey populations, breeding grounds, and somewhere to bask that has not become a parking lot. The empire’s ability to commission artificial rocks has not yet extended to commissioning a replacement food web.
“A heated floor is not an ecosystem,” she said. “We have now established this experimentally at considerable expense.”
Funding presents a separate problem. The council’s biodiversity pledge is substantial, but the treasury currently defines a pledge as money it would be gratifying to provide. Actual disbursement requires approval from a committee whose members are attending a conference about the importance of disbursement.
The environmental office has asked whether the empire might begin by ending its subsidy for draining wetlands beneath future luxury burrows. The treasury replied that the subsidy belonged to housing policy and was therefore not an environmental matter.
A proposed compromise would drain the wetland, build the burrow, and install a plaque acknowledging the former wetland. Scale has declined to sign it.
There is nevertheless progress. The delegation has agreed to publish a map showing the areas it wishes to protect. Coordinates will be redacted, species names replaced with initials, and all identifiable landmarks removed.
The resulting sheet is entirely green.
The Overlord praised its ambition and asked whether it could be framed. Scale requested that the framing budget be transferred to habitat restoration. The request has been recorded as a further pledge.