8/7/2023 0 Comments Hawaii telescope reviewFor a historically informed understanding of the conflict, we have to go back much further, to Hawaii’s annexation by the US in 1898, following which land was ceded to the US government. (India, a partner and full member of the TMT consortium, prefers moving the telescope to an alternate location in the Canary Islands, Spain.) In December 2019, the Governor of Hawai’i announced that “the state will reduce its law enforcement personnel on Maunakea”, an admission that the project cannot be forced through. But Native Hawaiians have continued opposing the TMT by blocking access to the mountain and courting arrest. In October 2018, the Supreme Court gave the go-ahead and construction was to resume in July 2019. In December 2015, the Supreme Court of Hawai’i invalidated the TMT’s 2011 construction permit because it had been granted before the opposition’s petitions had been addressed – putting, as the verdict observed, “the cart before the horse”. Preparations for TMT’s construction began in 2014 but were paused following opposition from Native Hawaiians – “protestors” to the state and the astronomers, “protectors” for the activists. As a result, it is already host to 13 observatories that have been built since the 1960s. The summit, at about 4,200 m above sea level, is particularly conducive for astronomy, with stable, dry air that allows observations throughout the year. The story of TMT in Hawai’i began in 2009, when the collaboration of scientists building the observatory selected Mauna Kea as the location. “How are we to understand the controversy over Mauna a Wākea and the TMT if we fail to identify or accept the context in which this battle is being waged if we fail to critically analyse settler-colonisation under US occupation?” Casumbal-Salazar is now an assistant professor at the Center for the Study of Culture, Race and Ethnicity at Ithaca College, New York. “At its core, Mauna a Wākea is about power,” writes Iokepa Casumbal-Salazar, who studied the TMT controversy for his doctoral thesis at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in 2017. This may seem an unlikely combination of charges against fellow astronomers who simply wish to “reach back 13 billion years to answer fundamental questions about the advent of the universe” ( source) – until one takes a closer look at the conflict, moving beyond its unhelpful framing as science versus religion and situating it in its historical context. An associated paper by five US and Canadian astronomers situates the TMT controversy in the long history of how astronomy has benefited from “settler colonial white supremacist patriarchy” and calls on the astronomy community to reject these benefits. Now, a white paper by Native Hawaiian scientists calls for an immediate halt to the TMT’s construction and for restarting dialogue. Native Hawaiians who consider Mauna Kea sacred have been at odds with the international consortium of astronomers behind the $1.4-billion Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), meant to be “the largest ground-based observatory in the world” ( source). Mauna Kea, an extinct volcano in Hawai’i, has been the site of a long-running conflict.
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