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The board of governors for the Thirty-Meter Telescope has chosen an alternate site for construction that could allow it to cut its losses in Mauna Kea:
The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) could move to La Palma, in Spain's Canary Islands, if opposition from Native Hawaiians prevents the next-generation observatory from being built atop the Hawaiian mountain of Mauna Kea as planned.
The decision, announced on 31 October by the TMT International Observatory's board of governors, creates an alternative path forward for the troubled mega-telescope. Its opponents blocked access to the Mauna Kea site in April 2015, halting construction, although work on the telescope's components continues at sites around the world. Native Hawaiians regard the decision to build the TMT on Mauna Kea as the continued desecration of a sacred mountaintop that hosts 13 other telescopes, some of which are being decommissioned.
In December, Hawaii's state supreme court nullified the permit that would have allowed the TMT to proceed. A fresh round of hearings began this month, with TMT officials seeking a new permit from the state's Bureau of Land and Natural Resources.
Previously:
Thirty Meter Telescope Considering Move as Hawaii Officials Open Hearing
Hawaiian Court Revokes Permit for Construction of Thirty-Meter-Telescope
Protests Temporarily Halt Thirty-Meter Telescope's Construction in Hawaii
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 01 2016, @03:40PM
maybe they should have said "we're not even talking to you about a new telescope until the derilict and unused telescopes from previous eras are demolished and the land there is made good".
The three least utilized scopes are already on a decommission schedule. [hawaii.edu]
That's not really the point either. Its land that native people have a legal claim of property rights on, that's why the court ruled in their favor. If the government condemned part of your property and let someone else build on it, would you be OK with letting them put up a brand new building on your property as long as they tore down the other one first?
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday November 01 2016, @04:25PM
Good question. Let me ask the legal experts at the Palestinian Authority.
(Score: 2) by fishybell on Tuesday November 01 2016, @05:54PM
Sure, the Palestinians, the Hawaiians, the Native Americans, the Australian Aborigines, etc. all have extremely good legal cases to various spots of land. The government currently occupying "their" lands also have extremely good legal cases. Their legal case is they are currently sitting on it and they have more guns.
If you ever think that the legal system doesn't boil down to just that, you're being naive. In this case of the Hawaiians it's about appeasement. Look at the case in North Dakota. The Sioux people have a claim, but their claim is being superseded by the claim of others, and there is no need to appease them. The Sioux aren't a significant enough portion of the population — unlike in Hawaii — to require appeasement.
The tensions in Hawaii over the natives and the modern Americans has always been high in some parts. See Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement [wikipedia.org] for more info. Things like the "no more telescopes" movement stem from the original tensions created by the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii through the creation of the 50th state.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Tuesday November 01 2016, @06:09PM
The Sioux aren't a significant enough portion of the population — unlike in Hawaii — to require appeasement.
Could you provide some numbers for this claim, or perhaps some parameters?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 01 2016, @06:34PM
A quarter of the population of hawaii has some native blood. That doesn't mean they are all in favor of sovereignty, far from it. But even though they don't hold the most extreme possible ideological position, there is still a substantial number of people who are not happy about completely ignoring the plight of their ohana.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Tuesday November 01 2016, @08:06PM
How much "some' does it take? The Department of Hawaiian Homelands used to require a 50 percent blood quotient to qualify to rent land. And I was more interested in the Lakota numbers, and whether we were taking them as a part of the Dakotas, only South Dakota, just on the Standing Rock Reservation, or of the United States as an oil consuming whole.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Tuesday November 01 2016, @07:27PM
The people in North Dakota have some actual, valid reasons to oppose the pipeline however: concerns about spills and environmental disasters. There have been multiple big pipeline accidents causing ecological problems.
With telescopes, this just isn't the case. The objections are purely religious, which equates to nonsense.
I can understand native peoples not wanting their ancestral lands being used for dirty industrial purposes, and those lands then being polluted heavily this way. But if I were a native person, I'd be really proud of my ancestral land being used for pure science work like astronomy that doesn't cause any significant environmental degradation. It's rather mind-boggling to me why these people are so opposed to having some telescopes around. It's not like they're powered by nuclear reactors or something.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 01 2016, @07:33PM
> . But if I were a native person, I'd be really proud
Did it ever occur to you that if you were a native person your values might not be the same as your current values?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 01 2016, @09:37PM
It's not 200 years ago any more.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 02 2016, @01:01AM
Yeah, 200 years and people gris are still unwilling to acknowledge the inherited power inequities of our modern state.
And that's why these conflicts are happening. They are part of a long-overdue reckoning, a truthful facing of our history and ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday November 02 2016, @03:17PM
Did it ever occur to you that if you were a native person your values might not be the same as your current values?
Did it ever occur to you that I could have totally different values while still remaining a white American? There's no shortage of white Americans who think that science is bunk, that religion is more important than science, that vaccines cause autism, that homeopathy works, that you can "pray away the gay", that money spent on space exploration or any other scientific research is wasted, that poor people in need of medical care should be left to die in the streets, that smoking is harmless, that it's OK to rape drunk women, I could go on and on.
Astronomy and pure science isn't something that benefits one group, it's something that benefits all of humanity. If your value system doesn't value pure science, then your value system is, quite frankly, shit. I don't care what ethnicity or culture you come from. There's nothing more universal than the search for knowledge. And there's plenty of shitty cultures that don't value this, including many subcultures I live very close to here in the US.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by rts008 on Tuesday November 01 2016, @07:45PM
I take offense at your judgement of me and mine being insignificant.
Trying to compare the situation at Standing Rock with Hawaii is is mistaken. There are far more issues involved than 'sacred ground' at Standing Rock.
Things like treaty violations, water source/supply, and rogue corporations, just to name a few.
Being an atheist, I find the 'sacred ground' arguments silly, but there is a lot more going on than that.
Why? Should treaties and agreements be discarded/ignored?
Good luck with that when your reputation is as worthless as your word, as NO ONE will ever want to do business/deal with you.
Bah!! Enough of talking to an honourless chofak.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 01 2016, @08:28PM
Fish wasn't defending the reasoning of the government, he was doing a sarcastically deadpan description of it.
(Score: 2) by lgw on Tuesday November 01 2016, @09:17PM
Why? Should treaties and agreements be discarded/ignored?
Good luck with that when your reputation is as worthless as your word, as NO ONE will ever want to do business/deal with you.
Treaties are routinely ignored by the side with more guns. Way of the world. Modern times have changed this a bit for the better in that you can have a lot of guns or a large economy and hold the other side to treaties, but that's not a change to human nature. The "word" of a nation is without value to begin with.