 One of my early professional experiences was when I was working as an intern for an environmental, non-governmental organization. This group was really interested in advocating for a particular approach to managing an adjacent wildlife refuge. I was asked for them to write a white paper summarizing the science on an elk disease that this refuge had problems with. And so I said about doing all of the background reading. I looked in the journals that I thought would have relevant insights. They're mostly ecology-oriented journals, conservation biology journals, even veterinary science journals, but coming from a very ecosystem-centric perspective. And what I found was that elk that aren't fed don't carry this disease. They cannot pass it from one animal to the other. Our fed are unnaturally crowded and they occur at higher densities than they would otherwise exist in. And when they're managed in that way, the disease spreads like wildfire. So my summary of the science suggested to me that the answer was simply to reduce the crowding of the elk. The way you do that is minimize or change the feeding regime. And I thought it was a pretty straightforward answer. And so I wrote a white paper that summarized those insights. And I started floating it by others in the community who might be interested in the first people I presented the information to. This was entirely compatible with their prior notions of how this ecosystem should be managed and they accepted my scientific conclusion without hesitation. But as I started to grow slightly further field in terms of speaking with stakeholders who weren't already on board with my management preferences, they had their own fully developed scientific narrative that was rooted in a different set of academic journals. And these were journals that were peer reviewed. They were legitimate. They had all of the prestigious characteristics of good journals, but they came from a more veterinary science orientation. And the science that these other folks were presenting or they argued back to me with suggested that what we need are better vaccines. We can vaccinate elk against this disease. The vaccines we currently have don't work terribly well, but that to them was an opportunity to do further research and improve the quality of those vaccines. And what I realized from that experience was there is not a single scientific explanation or understanding of this policy situation. In fact, there are at least two simultaneous explanations that wise and savvy and technically informed people could have. And science was not going to settle this issue. The divisions came not from an asymmetry and access to science and technical information. It came from just divergent values from the outset. What are the ecosystems for? What's the best way of approaching natural systems? To what extent is this a natural system versus a managed one? So the divisions were all about values and about politics and science was not going to settle this one.