“The project stands in blatant violation of multiple articles in the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,” the UCSD office stated. In July 2020, UC San Diego’s (UCSD) Office of External Affairs issued a statement asking the UC Board of Regents to stop funding the project.

The call to halt the construction of TMT and for the UC system to pull its funding from the project has also come from many UC students, organizations, and committees. “We oppose any construction made on sacred land without the free, prior, and informed consent of Kanaka Maoli.” “The TMT will cause harm to the mountain and destroy a sacred place for Kanaka Maoli’s spiritual and cultural practices,” their petition explained. The nonprofit organization Mauna Kea Education and Awareness, also created a petition with nearly 500,000 signatures asking that the construction be halted. In 2014, 2015, and 2019, protestors blocked the path to construction sites, with the 2019 protest resulting in 33 Hawaiian elders, Kupuna, being arrested. Kealoha Pisciotta, a Native Hawaiian protesting the telescope, told Earther, “I can remember the day that I really turned that corner when I started to realize that the human landscape was becoming dominant, and the sacred landscape being pushed down and suppressed and tampered with and destroyed.”Ī variety of peaceful methods have been used to try to prevent its construction. The campaign is part of a seven-year struggle to prevent the construction of the TMT, which was announced in 2014 when the TMT International Observatory LLC (TIO) - the group that oversees the TMT and selected Mauna Kea as its final choice for construction.

The email template used for the campaign notes several grievances, such as the construction of the TMT would desecrate land sacred to the Kanaka Maoli Native Hawaiians, as well as how it would disrupt the environment and ecosystem by potentially contaminating the water supply and hurting the mountain’s already fragile fauna and flora. In early November, an email campaign was launched asking the University of California (UC) Board of Regents to divest from the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on Mt.

Thirty meter telescope 2030