Richard Ha writes:
Big news! The State Board of Land and Natural Resources has just granted the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) a permit to build and operate its observatory on Mauna Kea. Read more at Hawaii 24/7.
We ran the following article here on the blog back in July 2009, at a much earlier phase of this project. It really explains it all and I’d like to share it with you again:
TMT Selects Mauna Kea, Promises Big Island $50 Million For Education
Initially published July 22, 2009
After deliberating for two days, the Thirty Meter Telescope Observatory Corp. board voted yesterday to site its new telescope here on Mauna Kea, not in Chile.
Although I’ve been working on this project for almost three years now, I was not prepared for the emotional rush that came when Henry Yang, president of the TMT, called to tell me of the decision.
All I could think about was how this would help our people launch their kids into the middle class. All that most of us want is for our kids to do a little better than we did.
The median family income in Hawai‘i is around $56,000. Here on the Big Island, it is $46,000. But on the east side of the Big Island, the median family income is in the mid-$30,000s. And in some communities it is in the low-$30,000s.
We all know that low family income is sometimes associated with social problems. And Hawaiian families occupy the lowest rungs on the family income ladder.
Education is directly related to family income. The more education, the higher the family income. Education is the great equalizer.
The Thirty Meter Telescope folks have pledged $1 million dollars annually for 50 years, which will be administered by carefully selected community members, primarily for K-12 education.
We all know that many of our students who enter college fail, or lower their aspirations, because they are not prepared to succeed. We want this TMT fund to prepare students to succeed.
So if we are truly interested in elevating our people and taking them away from drug problems, abusive relationships and other social ills, then we must help parents to launch their kids into the middle class. For those who are prepared to succeed, the sky is the limit.
My pop influenced me at an early age. When I was 10 years old, he inspired me with the attitude of “Not, no can. CAN!” So I know the value of influencing elementary school kids. They are very impressionable, and with the right environment and the right teachers, anything is possible.
This is why we created the Adopt-A-Class project. Sometimes the Keaukaha School kids come to our farm on their excursions. I tell them stories and give examples of how a positive attitude can overcome any problem. And at the end of the tour when I yell out “Not, no can!” they all yell back: “CAN!” Right on!
I see the annual $1 million Education Fund as a way of opening up kids’ minds and making them understand that they can do anything. We do not want our kids to wallow in victim-ism. That is waste time.
What we need is for them to have an optimism and a pride that our people were astronomers and the best navigators in the world. We want all kids, not just Hawaiians, to feel that high aspirations and goals are normal and not out of the ordinary.
The TMT leadership—Henry Yang and Jean Lou Chameau—listened to our advice very early on. They went and talked to community folks, like Kumu Lehua and Patrick Kahawaiola‘a, and they understood that the common denominator on which people on all sides of the issue could agree was the education of our keiki.
We have our eye on a goal, and so yesterday’s announcement that the TMT Board has decided on Mauna Kea for its new telescope is a huge, huge deal.
There is concern for too much on top of Mauna Kea. It does look cluttered. There is a plan to decommission three of the telescopes and return those areas to pristine condition. There is concern that the 30-meter will cause too many people going up there, ruining the environment. But this is the old way of astronomy, with astronomers physically at the telescope. As digital data becomes more predominant, there will be less and less need for astronomers to be physically located at the telescope.
The 30-meter telescope should be communicated to the Hawaiian people as a link between their pre-contact past and the approaching future. The pre-contact Hawaiians were excellent astronomers. Their knowledge of their astronomy was so sophisticated, they were setting out on open ocean crossings with confidence. At the time of the first Polynesians finding Hawaii, around 500AD, the Europeans were hugging their coastlines, afraid they would fall off the edge of the Earth. The British were only able to navigate the Pacific over a thousand years later because they had charts, astrolabes, sextants, compass, and time keeping clocks. The Polynesians and Hawaiians were navigating across vast distances of open ocean, not only with none of those inventions, but without ever inventing writing. The 30-meter is a link and direct extension of this connection to the stars.