The controversy over the construction of a new telescope on Mauna Kea is extremely difficult with no easy resolution.
Perhaps it might help to consider sacred places in general.
Sacred places are particular sites, areas and/or landscapes possessing one or more attributes that distinguish them as somehow quite extraordinary, usually in a religious or spiritual sense.
Individuals may experience a sacred place in different ways as a site of awe, mystery, power, fascination, attraction, connectedness, oneness, danger, ordeal, healing, ritual, meaning, identity, revelation and/or transformation.
In addition to human constructions such as churches and temples, a wide range of "natural" phenomena are thought to be sacred by people in the more than 7,000 cultures existing in the world today, and especially by indigenous peoples who have dwelled in an area for centuries or millennia.
Sacred places in nature may include particular mountains, volcanoes, hills, caves, rocks, dunes, soils, waterfalls, springs, rivers, streams, lakes, ponds, swamps, trees, groves, forests, plants, animals, wind, clouds, rain and rainbows. In addition, there are coastal and marine phenomena that may be believed to be sacred, such as parts of marshes, mangroves, estuaries, lagoons, beaches, islands, sea arches, sea grass beds, coral reefs and tides.
Often places in the landscape are not only geological, biological, cultural, geographical, historic and/or prehistoric, but religious or spiritual and thus sacred.
Billions of people throughout the world variously recognize and appreciate the special meanings and significances of certain sacred places in their own habitats and elsewhere. Many of these sites attract pilgrims and tourists, some sites with thousands or even millions of visitors annually; for example, Lourdes in France or Mecca in Saudi Arabia. Moreover, it is more than simply curious that individuals from many different ecological, cultural, religious and national backgrounds may quite independently view the same site as sacred, like Mount Kailas in Tibet.
A particular sacred place or area can encompass various individual sites and phenomena as integral parts of a whole, thereby comprising an entire sacred landscape, sometimes with different degrees of sacredness in different places. An example is Mount Shasta in northern California with its waterfalls, springs, caves and meadows considered sacred by the Wintu and several other Native American cultures in the region.
Sites can be connected by a river, legends or stories, the histories of individuals or groups, and/or pilgrimage routes, like the centuries old Way of Saint James to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Spain.
In contrast, there are other sacred places, or parts thereof, where humans are excluded, or access is strictly limited to a special class of individuals, such as ritual specialists, healers or elders.
Sacred places are complex phenomena that can be viewed as varying along several continua ranging from natural (or biophysical) to anthropogenic (or socio-cultural); prehistoric to historic, recent or newly created; secret or private to public; single culture (or religion) to multicultural (or multi-religious); intrinsic to extrinsic in value; uncontested to contested; and protected to endangered. Particular sacred places tend to variously reflect one pole or another with some combination of these continua. It is also noteworthy that many sacred places have persisted for centuries or even millennia.
Sacred places are an integral part of the human condition and experience. The phenomenon of sacred places is an ancient cross-cultural universal. They merit special respect on their own merits as well as out of due respect for the people and their culture and religion that consider them sacred. As such, desecration of a sacred place is dehumanizing for those who believe it to be sacred, and also for those who desecrate it.
Leslie E. Sponsel is a professor emeritus in the Department of Anthropology, University of Hawaii-Manoa, and author of "Spiritual Ecology: A Quiet Revolution."
