The actual legal issues in question are barely touched on in the article:
> But some environmentalists and Native Hawaiian groups say the spread of observatories on the summit has polluted the mountain, interfering with traditional cultural and religious practices, or are actually infringing on the sovereignty of the Hawaiian kingdom.
The links in the article to the actual decisions are broken (for me at least) The article https://bigislandnow.com/2018/08/08/supreme-court-rules-in-f... implies that the issues were largely procedural and this decision isn't actually deciding if any of the above are true.
So I'm left seeing big claims, but no real idea on if those claims are true-but-ignored, mostly-not-true, or a fringe-group-only-viewpoint. (While the media coverage IMPLIES that those claims ARE decided, and it's that implication that bugs me)
I think the BBC report that I submitted earlier this morning [0] did a better job of discussing the environmentalists' case. In particular, it linked to the Office of Hawaiian Affairs's civil complaint [1] which is probably the best version of the arguments against the telescope. Summary: the complaint alleges that mismanagement of the telescope site, including poor financial planning and procedural issues, has led to a history of hazardous material spills and car accidents, and that failure to implement the 2009 Comprehensive Management Plan constitutes a breach of contract. There is also a longer explanation of why Mauna Kea is sacred to native Hawaiians.
For the record, I strongly support building the TMT. But the opposition isn't totally illegitimate and I think it's worth covering both sides fairly.
So it sounds like it's less that the entire enterprise is offensive on the face of it (like building on Uluru in Australia would be), and more that the locals don't trust the management to be respectful of the land and not fuck shit up?
There are people who consider Mauna Kea to be sacred and there's not really anything that could argue against a specific person's particular belief.
However I will say that there is no widespread religious activity involving the top of the mountain. There are far more people performing ceremonies and leaving sacrifices at Kilauea or even just various heiau, a type of man-made temple site. Even that is a very low proportion of native Hawaiians.
People feel respectful of it and it has widespread meaning but these feelings are barely above average compared to the respect felt for all other geographical regions and features of Hawaii.
My point here is that there's no substantive disruption to anyone's religious expression.
Even these religious activities are pretty rare, as Christianity was pushed pretty hard once missionaries converted the royalty in the 19th century.
Most of the time when people are against building telescopes, the conversation seems to carry on to reveal that it's kind of a proxy used to air greivances for the long history of ethno-political issues.
There was a reference above referring to the telescopes as a violation of the Kingdom of Hawaii which hasn't existed for over a century- to include a telescope under that standard you would literally require the formation of a new country. Obviously in that case, building a dog house by the ocean would be equally impermissible.
Ancient Hawaiians took their religion very very seriously, and still had quarries up there due to high quality stone availability, so they didn't seem to think technological exploitation was much of an affront.
From what I know about Uluru, it's far more significant to a much larger swath of people, and it's a much smaller area than a whole mountain.
Someone could have a different perspective than I do or might know something that would invalidate some of the points I made, and I welcome the input.
> infringing on the sovereignty of the Hawaiian kingdom
Is there actually any legally recognized sovereignty for Hawaii or native Hawaiians? Tried doing a quick search but it all came back with an ongoing sovereignty movement but nothing similar to the Native American tribes.
My understanding (based on visiting hawaii as a tourist and not much else) is that no, there's not a US-legally recognized sovereignty, but there is a step back from:
* "They voluntarily joined the US" language
* the repression of culture - in particular but not limited to language, which was apparently ruthlessly quashed for a long while and is enjoying a lot more respect today, relatively speaking.
In a courtroom I doubt this would count for much, but in a war of PR releases it can be significant, and most of what I found about this case was press releases.
There's a rich history of corporations and the us government screwing over Hawaiians. The monarchy was overthrown by a group of businessmen and sugar planters after they forced Queen Liliuokalani to abdicate. Two years later it became a US territory against the wishes of the natives. Then the sugar industry help keep it a territory for 60 years because they could import cheap foreign labor.
History of Hawaii is all about using force to take land from the population. First settler where from the Marquesas Islands and they were conquered by the Tahitians.
Are you saying that it doesn’t matter that sovergty was taken violently from the Hawaiians because their ancestors conquered the original inhabitants hundreds of years ago?
Would it be fair if Russia came in and took Hawaii from the US because the “History of Hawaii is all about using force to take land from the population”?
They have a different situation than the rest of the US mainly because the reservation system in the other states is where the tribes were herded and each occurred in a different era. Its really a whole separate thing and sovereignty has some real differences in meaning, although the courts do mix some rulings.
Hi, I just replied to the original comment but no there is no Hawaiian tribe. Many (most?) Hawaiians dont want to be a recognized tribe because they consider themselves a nation within a nation.
The HSC held that Native Hawaiian rights would not be substantially impacted by the TMT, which was an issue in the administrative hearing that took place from 2016-2017, and what was being appealed in this HSC case.
What was procedural was the previous administrative hearing was ruled invalid because BLNR granted the permit before convening the hearing, so those that wanted to voice their grievances weren't given a real opportunity to. HSC said that violated due process and remanded the case for a second administrative hearing. It is this second hearing, regarding the TMT building permit, that this court case deals with.
The judge in the administrative hearing, a retired state judge, found that there would be no substantial impacts to natural resources, most importantly water resources, but also cultural and archaeological resources. The University of Hawaii brought in a hydrologist with expertise in local (Big Island) water resources to demonstrate why and the hearing officer (the administrative judge) accepted that based on the hydrologists scientific expertise in local water issues. It was then found to be a valid conclusion when appealed to the HSC.
If you want to read the conclusion of the hearing officer in the administrative hearing, her findings of fact and conclusions of law can be read here https://dlnr.hawaii.gov/mk/files/2017/07/783-Hearing-Officer... (long: 305 pages). This was what BLNR used to grant the permit. And as a matter of it being so thorough and as a matter of everyone being a chance to voice their opinion, the HSC upheld the permit and the conclusions of the hearing officer.
I think that since it didn't voluntarily surrender its sovereignty, some might feel it should still have it, but I don't know too much about the subject, so maybe it's time for me to read up a bit.
The stuff about pollution and interruption of cultural practices is more about the idea that those things are being forced upon native Hawaiians, much like annexation was.
Not all native Hawaiians feel this way about the telescopes, but the ones that do are the ones protesting.
> Not all native Hawaiians feel this way about the telescopes, but the ones that do are the ones protesting.
Plus some other tribal folks from the rest of the US showed up to protest. I'm glad this was posted, now I know what the heck they were talking about when the relatives used the phrase "going to Hawaii to protest a volcano". I was a bit confused.
I was in Kona for the Iron Man Worlds just a couple of weeks ago. We spent some time up and down the west coast there.
And for what it's worth I saw more Kingdom of Hawaii flags than any other.
On a side note I could move there tomorrow and take up surfing. So anybody willing to have a remote engineer working on Hawaii time just let me know...
Fwiw it’s probably not as beautiful but for the continental US I recommend San Diego for remote eng and surfing. There’s a bit less localism and it’s at least 70% as beautiful and probably 200% more convenient :)
Presumably this is somewhat similar to other native american tribes where there are treaties and legal structures that allow them to make their case under that name / formalized what it means today?
No, not really. The entire Hawaiian archipelago was annexed as US territory. There was no comparable "nation status" as exists on native American reservations today.
The autonomy and sovereignty of continental tribes is severely curtailed by the US claim of plenary authority over them. They are independent nations largely in name only.
> They are independent nations largely in name only.
I was under the impression that the "independent nations" concept implied independence from the states. Naturally as the power in the US has shifted away from the states towards the federal government the autonomy and sovereignty of the tribes has decreased.
> Tribes possess all powers of self-government except those relinquished under treaty with the United States, those that Congress has expressly extinguished, and those that federal courts have ruled are subject to existing federal law or are inconsistent with overriding national policies.
At least for those with actual reservations and treaties they are allowed quite a bit of self governance and such. They can make their own laws, form a government as they wish, tax, regulate, decide who is a member and such.
That has not changed at all.
It sounds strange, and it kind of is, but in reality life on a reservation in most cases is rough, few options to make a living, lots of substance abuse, tribal politics can be pretty petty and nasty. I lived near a reservation for a while and the first thing you think "oh man they have this nation inside a nation they could do a lot of things" but really life is rough there.
Well, yes, that's the issue at hand. Probably legally you're just as correct as that issue recently where a bunch of tourists were stomping all over some hills that were sacred to Australian aborigines, but according to the Australian government were legal hiking paths. The most, legally, the aborigines could do was put up a sign saying "these hills are important to us for religious, please don't walk on them."
There's a lot of issues going on right now that draw the majority of my energy (climate change, propagation of hate, etc), so unfortunately I can't bring myself to look into or exert effort into the moral debate of natives' rights, but I think it's a massive issue with huge implications and not nearly so clear-cut as some of the other ones we're dealing with (i.e., climate change is straightforward easy to argue about).
The issue, as I see it:
Take Native Americans in the USA. Outside the written-law rights they have regarding their reservations, one could argue their sovereignty was violated if, say, a plot of land bought in the 1600s (off-reservation) that happened to include a burial mound was developed on. One could also argue that, yes, their sovereignty was violated, but they failed to defend their sovereignty, and so it was relinquished (I don't like this because I think seizing via violence is fucked). One could also argue that they aren't the prime sovereign claim to that land - one tribe might have warred and taken it from another some 500 years prior, so why should the most recent tribe be considered the morally "sovereign" authority on the land?
Which brings me to the point that really concerns me: Taiwan. Populated by natives that were mingling with mainland Chinese for centuries, before a total Japanese takeover. Japanese sovereign territory (by violence). But then, mainland Chinese take over, uh, "back again?" Maybe? Arguable. Either way, another violent sovereign takeover. And finally, a civil war in China between two political parties, with a huge swath of one side fleeing in defeat to Taiwan. Is that even a sovereign takeover, or a political shift? And what of the aborigines, during this time?
Now China is claiming sovereignty over Taiwan, and from one point of view, they kind of do have a claim - Taiwan was technically Mainland Chinese territory, given back after Japan lost the war, and the Communist party did overthrow the Democratic party. However, the Communists did not successfully completely terminate the Democratic party (which is great because who wants more death), so on the other hand, I can see why ROC(Taiwan)'s claim to the island is also legitimate.
Either way, I'm terrified PRC will enforce their self-proclaimed sovereignty over the nation (which is effectively non-existent at present) using violence, which I'm not sure ROC(Taiwan) would be able to withstand, and then I'm worried afterwards the rest of the world will let China get away with it for the slippery sovereign arguments listed above.
The point you are nearly reaching is that the idea of "sovereignty rights" is largely fiction. Sovereignty begins and ends at your ability to defend your claims with rhetorical or violent methods of persuasion. Even within a single legal system, like the United States federal vs state power questions, you can see how reality trumps theory.
> don't like this because I think seizing via violence is fucked
As you acknowledge in the next paragraph, it’s not like Native Americans weren’t seizing land from each other by violence. So what good does it do to write off the primary ways in which land is acquired in the absence of any applicable legal process?
I didn't intend to write off, I just took a moment to insert my own opinion.
Does bring up a good point though - are the borders of most countries now "locked in?" Perhaps. Federations might form / break apart, which could shift around "sovereign territory." Like, imagine the EU consolidating, or the USA splitting.
Interesting thing about annexation is that legally it isn't the taking of territory, it's recognizing that an area has always been part of one's territory.
This can get messy, but it can also give rise to some really culturally fascinating places, like the Alsace.
The law itself is predicated on violence. What would a legal ruling mean without enforcement? Indeed the colonization of the new world was entirely legal under the laws of the colonists.
For anyone interested in more information about the history and tensions behind the project, the Offshore podcast (a podcast that examines race and identity relations in Hawaii) produced very good season on the TMT[0]. Mauna Kea is sacred and the promises and ownership disputes over building on the mountain is an issue that should not be overlooked.
Hawaii is in a unique position because there are still plenty of native Hawaiians around. They arent a native tribe recognized by the U.S. government and some number (most in my mind) dont want to be. Because the overthrow of the last government of the Kingdom of Hawaii was done under shady conditions (basically the sugar barons formed a provisional government and then told the U.S. that they'd like to become a part of the U.S. They did this to join the free trade area that U.S. states enjoy to lower their shipping costs. They had actually tried this once before and then President Grover Cleveland shut them down. He stated that Hawaii had an existing government and seemed to have popular support of the people. But later they tried again and that time the U.S. agreed to annex Hawaii. It was operated essentially as a colony from then on until the 1950's.
So Hawaii is a normal U.S. state. It has state legislation. It obeys federal laws. Except, occasionally native Hawaiians will stand up about some issue. And when that happens, sometimes everyone else will bend toward their perspective. A lot of normal people do so out of respect for native Hawaiians. Politicians do it because it is politically tough to stand in opposition of Hawaiians. As a side note, there are very few republicans in Hawaii. There are none in the state legislature or U.S. representatives. There are a growing number of republicans that grow from the strong military presence.
The thing is, when Hawaiians protest its hard to figure out who or how many they represent. Because there is no official Hawaiian government. (There is the Office of Hawaiian Affairs (OHA). But dont even get me started. lol) So no one can say "Hawaiians dont want the thirty meter telescope (TMT)". You can only say, "those people protesting over there dont want the TMT".
My instinct is that a large amount of this particular protest springs forth from the students of the University of Hawaii. When people started talking about the telescope students started to organize, hold meetings, and invite speakers. At one point the students built an ahu which is a an altar built out of stones right in the main field when you come upon the university, next to the president's office.
The University is probably too scared to remove it. Months later the students planted trees around it. It'll be there forever. Some say that native Hawaiians came to some professors at the University and asked them to help organize but that the core of the anti-telescope movement are native Hawaiians. Its impossible to say. There has never been any kind of survey or vote of native Hawaiians- which itself would be impossible as there is no real registry of native Hawaiians.
This was a long way to say, the only reason this went court was because of protest that, at least in part, included some native Hawaiians. No matter what the court decides, nothing is certain. It could still be slowed for years or indefinitely. If Hawaiians block the one road up the mountain, and are willing to get arrested on a daily basis, its hard to imagine that any politician would back the continued construction.
>The thing is, when Hawaiians protest its hard to figure out who or how many they represent. Because there is no official Hawaiian government. (There is the Office of Hawaiian Affairs (OHA). But dont even get me started. lol) So no one can say "Hawaiians dont want the thirty meter telescope (TMT)". You can only say, "those people protesting over there dont want the TMT".
>My instinct is that a large amount of this particular protest springs forth from the students of the University of Hawaii.
You're partially right. The protests are fueled largely by sovereignty activists, some of whom are trained as sovereignty activists in the University of Hawaii School of Hawaiian knowledge, which is sort of a de facto sovereignty training camp. The dean is a vocal sovereignty activist.
> If Hawaiians block the one road up the mountain, and are willing to get arrested on a daily basis, its hard to imagine that any politician would back the continued construction.
Not true. This is exactly what happened with the solar telescope on Maui, and for the exact same reasons. The protesters were arrested in the streets and construction continued. There has been no decrease in support.
Your point about there being no universally recognized Native Hawaiian representative organization is a very good one. There's no group or finite set of groups, that the TMT could reach an agreement with (by providing scholarships, environmental offsets, rent, etc.) and then be free from the protests. Three people getting angry in a Hilo coffee shop can stop construction of the TMT.
I currently work for one of the big agencies behind astronomical observing, and my boss was telling me today (an hour before I show him this article) about the unnecessary amount of environmental hurdles this project has gone through. And he mentioned that during the protests that occurred at the construction site, equipment was actually vandalized.
This is a common problem with Supreme Court cases. They cases often touch on major, substantive issues, but the legal question that the Court decides is a technical detail.
You can interpret this as either: Judges decide how they want the case to go, and can find a loophole for either the appellant or the appellee (as well evidenced by the frequency of 5-4 decisions); or that the public simple misunderstands the meaning of most cases' decisions.
The problem is exacerbated by the Supreme Court's limited time-budget for cases, and its interest in taking on a wide diversity of cases. A case may set precedent for many future similar cases, even if the Court's rationale for the decision isn't relevant to those other cases.
I'm glad this got pushed through - environmentalists in Hawaii can be an interesting bunch, and often choose to blockade things that are high profile simply to get their message out, even if the ecological impact is highly minimal. A great example of this in the past was the Hawaii Superferry[1], which was blockaded by environmentalists who said that it would damage the reef. Which while it might be true, standard shipping freighters already travelled the same route and had a higher ecological impact than the lighter dual-hulled ferry, which would have taken a lot of the shipping volume of the more damaging ships. By blocking the ferry, the environmentalists got a lot of publicity, but ultimately the reef ended up suffering more as the ferry got shut down.
With this, the ecological impact will be highly minimal (based on the impact of the existing observatory and the environmental studies done after the plans were drawn up), but it's very high profile so a natural target for them. I'm very glad that the court pushed it through as they had no data to back up their claims that that it would pollute the mountain. The claim that it interfered with traditional and cultural practices has some merit, but that's only because the entire mountain of Mauna Kea is considered sacred - nothing about the peak itself is special. Also, there's already a ton of observatories up there[2], so it wouldn't be changing the status quo in any way. Overall I personally saw their protests as more political than based on arguments with merit.
The “SuperFerry” was a huge boondoggle that tried to endrun around the EIS process which dozens of other ferrys around the country seemed to have no trouble complying with. The economics never supported a passenger ferry and the whole thing was a smokescreen to milk DoD.
I visited the top of Mauna Kea a couple of months ago, as a tourist. It is a fascinating place, already so populated with telescopes that it is tough to imagine how adding another (likely built more carefully than older ones) could cause grave damage, interference with other uses of the area, etc.
On the other hand: some of the telescopes have been there many years and are probably somewhat obsolete by today's standards, producing little new science. Perhaps one of the existing structures could have been removed to make room for the TMT, to lessen conflict.
>On the other hand: some of the telescopes have been there many years and are probably somewhat obsolete by today's standards, producing little new science.
I can assure you most of those telescopes are still being used for new science.
There is a serious lack of "big" telescopes, globally. We simply don't have enough instruments to follow up everything we want to look at, and getting time on these "old" instruments is still competitive. A big part of this is location: Mauna Kea has fantastic skies and is good for things like IR astronomy as a result of its elevation.
Telescope optics are fairly simple. They're a bunch of mirrors which focus light in one place - a 2m mirror is a 2m mirror. The main maintenance task is cleaning or re-coating, which happens once in a while. While larger telescopes really need adaptive optics to fulfill their potential, you don't need it unless you need to resolve tiny objects in crowded fields.*
One good use for these smaller telescopes is long observations, or repeat observations. Time domain astronomy is a Big Thing at the moment, and for a lot of objects you don't need a 30 metre mirror (the main benefit of which is seeing extremely faint stuff). Another use is follow-up work, which is rather mundane, but necessary. For example you get a bunch of targets back from a sky survey and you want to observe them all for a period of time. Doing that on something like the TMT or ELT would be a fantastic waste of resources. Usually you would need to prove, using a smaller telescope, that it would be worth pointing a O(10m) mirror at it.
What often changes is the instrumentation: lower noise or higher resolution CCDs, fancier spectrographs, etc. These can all be retrofitted to fit onto older telescopes.
* more specifically, if you want to do diffraction-limited imaging and your telescope can theoretically resolve better than atmospheric seeing.
The Governor decided that three telescopes would come down. One of these is the tiny UH Hilo education telescope, so it's not really anything like the others. Many people think that this particular telescope, the only one whose purpose is directly aimed at educating the local astronomy students, should not be the one sacrificed on the altar of the TMT, especially since its local impact is practically zero.
see the peer comment though. The thing I had asked about, was less than what is actually being done! It sounds like the project will actually result in a net reduction of two telescopes.
Keeping that in mind, and the physics of the situation regarding elevation and atmosphere etcetera, it's tough to side with the protesters on this specific dispute.
I don't think this ruling changes much. The TMT project had permission to start construction 3 years ago. They could not even hold the ground-breaking ceremony, because protesters blocked the access road. Every time the TMT construction crews tried to drive up the mountain, protesters would stand in the road, and block the vehicles. A couple of hours later police would show up. They would stand around for 3ish more hours, and then arrest perhaps 5% of the people blocking the road. By the time that was done, it was too late for the construction crews to get to the summit and do any work, so everyone drove back down. The few people who were arrested were immediately released once they arrived in Hilo, so they'd be ready to do it all again the next day if the crews tried to return to the mountain. No significant fines were ever levied on the arrested protesters.
The only way the TMT construction will be able to proceed is if local law enforcement is willing to arrest dozens of protesters (including "aunties" - photogenic elderly Hawaiian women) every week day, and not release them immediately. There is absolutely no reason to believe that will happen.
Even if the local law enforcement officials are willing to perform mass arrests, there are lots of other pressure points that the protesters could attack. I would not be surprised to see the protesters shut down the University of Hawaii, which hosts the Institute for Astronomy that runs Maunakea Observatory, because that university has a very active Hawaiian Studies program.
I worked for an observatory on Maunakea when the the first set of TMT construction protests took place. The protesters were allowed to build an unpermitted shelter building, to make blocking the road more convenient for them. If they spend half a day piling rocks in the road, they can declare that it is a sacred shrine, and the road maintenance crews cannot simply remove it. Meanwhile, our observatory had to go through a formal review process with an outside board if we wanted to move a small weather station from one side of our building's roof to another side.
This is great to hear! Mauna Kea is a far better location for the kind of science TMT will be doing [1], especially when it has to compete with the European Extremely Large Telescope in the southern hemisphere.
This is actually a fun case to read, I was mainly looking for what the dissenting opinion was, since it was 4-1.
I think at least one of the points can be appealed in the federal courts, if the US Supreme Court would be down to hear it - so there would be several gambles.
> In any event, as held by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Navajo Nation v. U.S. Forest Serv.
, 535 F.3d 1058, 1077 (9th Cir. 2008) RLUIPA “applies only
to government land-use regulations of private land such as zoning laws not to the government’s management of its
own land. Therefore, this point of error is without merit.
Not that the government would ever cede control over its own land, I just feel like the current Supreme Court would be more lenient to religious arguments.
All the rest of this particular case ignores the religious arguments and focuses on the procedural stuff, which was all done by the book and expected of a state and federal permitting agency, at least compared to arbitrary claims by religious folks.
Now on to the dissenting opinion:
I gather no real rebuttal, just a partial affirmation to "points I-III" and no comment on the other points. hm.
To the group of native-space-beings I just made up and claim to be a member of.
Launching things into space violates our sovereignty. It tramples our sacred orbits, and makes a mockery of our proud heritage.
We shall protest all launches, all progress, all research, and especially anything that might make money or improve anyone's life in even the tiniest way. We'll feed off the publicity, and the habit of some in the media to represent even our whack-ass views as being co-equal and legitimate right alongside everyone else.
And when people claim we made it all up, we'll only gather the sympathy of other whackaloons who've been accused of the same. It will only make us stronger.
We shall call ourselves the Righteous Indig Nation.
There is something to be said for having at least one 30 meter class telescope in the Northern hemisphere. There are parts of the sky which are never visible from Chile.
>Thirty Meter astronomers had said if they didn’t get a green light to build on Mauna Kea, they would build it on La Palma in the Canary Islands, off Africa.
La Palma's air quality is also not as good as Mauna Kea's (more dust blowing over from the Sahara), if I recall correctly. It may be the second best site in the northern hemisphere, but it's significantly behind the top choice.
Altitude is not everything, and higher altitude does not automatically translate into better performance of the instrument. There are many, many factors that matter, including light pollution, transparency, cloud cover, air turbulence, jet streams, etc.
A report by the Canadian Astronomical Society (Canada has a ~15% stake) found that with taking all these variables into play, Mauna Kea is still the best site for TMT. See page 35 for the final recomendations: http://casca.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/CATAC-Report-Fina...
Off-topic: the publication is named "staradvertiser". (The adds do seem unusually well-targeted to me.) It's the first time I see a publication whose name is clearly trying to appeal to advertisers rather than viewers. Has anyone else seen any others? Any insights about their counter-intuitive decision?
The name is a relic of the past. We originally had two newspapers in here, the Honolulu Advertiser and the Star-Bulletin. A while back the two merged into what we now know as the Star Advertiser.
For what it's worth, as the only major newspaper, they don't have to go out of their way to appeal to advertisers. If you want to buy print ads, you don't have much choice.
The name isn't trying to appeal to advertisers, it's just a name that's been inherited via mergers. The "advertiser" part of it came from the "Pacific Commercial Advertiser" which was a daily Hawaii based newspaper formed in 1856. If you look up lists of newspapers[1], you'll see that "Advertiser" was a common name for them in the mid 1800s.
Advertiser was a common name for newspapers at the time. It's an old publication (although I'm pretty sure it was called SomethingElse Advertiser). I'd guess it's using the older definition of advertiser "call attention to". The fact that the ads were well targeted was coincidence.
> But some environmentalists and Native Hawaiian groups say the spread of observatories on the summit has polluted the mountain, interfering with traditional cultural and religious practices, or are actually infringing on the sovereignty of the Hawaiian kingdom.
The links in the article to the actual decisions are broken (for me at least) The article https://bigislandnow.com/2018/08/08/supreme-court-rules-in-f... implies that the issues were largely procedural and this decision isn't actually deciding if any of the above are true.
So I'm left seeing big claims, but no real idea on if those claims are true-but-ignored, mostly-not-true, or a fringe-group-only-viewpoint. (While the media coverage IMPLIES that those claims ARE decided, and it's that implication that bugs me)