Mauna Kea plans must proceed with care
With privilege comes responsibility. Few could question the privilege and opportunity that has come to the island of Hawai'i with the selection of Mauna Kea as the site for the Thirty Meter Telescope project, the largest, most powerful installation of its kind in the world.
It's a cause for celebration that the astronomers of the University of Hawai'i now have the opportunity to demonstrate their pre-eminence in the field.
The development of this state-of-the-art instrument should yield data that teaches the world more about the formation of the universe than ever before.
The pristine mountain environment was selected for the crystalline atmospheric clarity, yielding the level of visibility needed for quality imaging. And it's rare that such a setting is found relatively close to the amenities of communities that the Big Island offers.
So it is also a privilege for the TMT developers to be given access to the site.
This is where the responsibility comes in. The Board of Land and Natural Resources in April approved the UH comprehensive management plan for Mauna Kea. It was nowhere nearly as comprehensive as it should have been, because it failed to fully address key issues, most notably the plans for new developments such as the TMT.
The land board bridged the gap by making approval contingent on completing four "subplans" to fill in the blanks on:
UH must submit these plans within one year or before the submission of a Conservation District Use Application for any new use, whichever happens sooner.
UH is now under the gun to produce the plans and maintain that timetable so the permitting of the new telescope won't face unnecessary delays.
Ideally, the planning for Mauna Kea should not have been this kind of work-in-progress; the details should have been fleshed out before the state flashed the green light.
It's now incumbent on the land board to give the sub-plans rigorous attention. The TMT telescope can become a boon to science and to the state as a whole, but it can't meet that potential if its development does not proceed carefully.
That would ruin the very environment that has made Mauna Kea so prized to Hawaiians, ancient and contemporary.
