In your testimony, you talked about a “more meaningful inclusion of public values and opinions within aquaculture management and government policy decisions.” It seems to me that referring to “public values and opinions”, while every citizen can certainly refer to that, is not very scientific.
What we need, as policy makers, are cold, hard scientific facts. Public values and opinions are important to us, as elected officials, but I would suggest that restricting what scientists do to objective facts, and reporting them in a manner that we can put into the decision-making mix, is more appropriate. Could you comment on that?