One philosophical question. This action is one that's going to be controversial. You are planning on dropping 1.5 tons of rat poison on a group of islands that

One philosophical question. This action is one that's going to be controversial. You are planning on dropping 1.5 tons of rat poison on a group of islands that has extensive native wildlife and is not especially far from human inhabited lands. Before the public has their say, should the default decision be 'we do this' or 'we don't do this'? In other words, if the response from the public is mixed - what ought be the default decision? I don't think there's a right answer here, but differences in opinion on this topic might explain why people see this very differently. One group might see the failure of people to create compelling technical arguments that the experts did not consider to be sufficient reason to carry forward. Another group might see the government's failure to convince the public of the plan's validity to be sufficient reason to scrap it. I also wouldn't extrapolate this to things that are inappropriate. For instance when major loss of life or other such issues are in play, there's little time or relevance to see what the public has to say. So I'm speaking only of cases such as this where the consequences for inaction are relatively low.