Henry Yang’s Thirty Meter Telescope Meets New Managers and Longtime Protesters

The UC Board of Regents meet this Tuesday, and though the controversial Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) in Hawai’i isn’t on the agenda, five student advocates intend to insist that the board abandon the $2.6 billion project. The regents are among an international group sponsoring the telescope located high on Mauna Kea, a culturally and environmentally important peak to native Hawaiians. Chairing the board for the TMT International Observatory is Henry Yang, the chancellor at UC Santa Barbara, where the student group Mauna Kea Protectors is dedicated to stopping the telescope project.

The UC and its boardmembers usually keep a tight lid on the project, but students like Mariela Vasquez from Mauna Kea Protectors at UC Santa Barbara want to tell them how wrong they are. “They say, ‘Oh, it’s just one more telescope’ like it excuses the continued abuse of Indigenous people,” Vasquez said during a recent presentation.

The Mauna Kea Protectors — which also formed at UCLA and UC Berkeley — are backed by the UC Student Association’s first campaign for “Students Enacting Environmental Defense.” Though they are petitioning against the telescope and surveying ways to reinvest the funds in Indigenous communities, it could be all for naught. The University of California is required to contribute $107,223,485 from 2014 to 2024, UCSB’s student-run newspaper the Daily Nexus reported.