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Thirty Meter Telescope protests were held in Hawaii and on the mainland Wednesday as part of Mauna Kea Awareness Day organized by those who oppose the $1.4 billion project. Read more

Thirty Meter Telescope protests were held in Hawaii and on the mainland Wednesday as part of Mauna Kea Awareness Day organized by those who oppose the $1.4 billion project.

Dozens of students, faculty and staff rallied against the TMT at the University of Hawaii at Manoa throughout the day while demonstrations and events were held at various University of California campuses and a few other institutions across the mainland.

“It was a successful day of student-led demonstrations,” organizer Healani Sonoda-Pale of Ka Lahui Hawaii said.

At the University of California, Los Angeles, Mauna Kea Hui leader Kealoha Pisciotta and musician/activist Liko Martin testified before the University of California Board of Regents, urging the members to divest in the project. The California university system is one of the partners in the TMT.

“I have no animosity toward them but we really need them to wake up and look around and do something for the Earth,” Pisciotta said in an interview after the meeting.

Pisciotta, the former astronomy worker who has helped lead the legal fight against the TMT, said she and other opponents wanted to tell the regents how the project is affecting the Native Hawaiian people and how many of them “are willing to lay down their bodies in front of the bulldozers.”

UCLA was also one of a handful of UC campuses that saw anti-TMT sign waving and the passing out of anti-TMT brochures primarily by sympathetic Pacific Islander students and other indigenous tribe members. In all, at least 16 campuses were involved in Wednesday’s protest, organizers said.

At Manoa, students passed out information to hundreds of their peers as they walked to class and urged them to sign a petition against the project.

Ilima Long, a political science graduate student at UH, said she felt compelled to take action Wednesday because UH Manoa continues to push the giant telescope on Mauna Kea despite student and faculty opposition.

“We’re not going to stand for this in our name,” Long said.

Staff writer Diane S.W. Lee contributed to this story.