How strange that the decision to build the Thirty Meter Telescope and the choice to pursue its construction through legal challenges and protest occupations should produce so much damage to so many people and so many institutions in Hawaii. We can start with the state’s political leadership.

David Ige’s proclamation of an emergency at the Daniel K. Inouye Highway had allowed, initially, most other politicians to stay fairly silent on the issue and avoid antagonizing a part of their constituency. As a lame-duck governor, Ige doesn’t have to worry about his career and there is no sign that he is worried about the futures of any of the agencies that have to enforce his intransigence on the telescopes, as agency directors Suzanne Case, Ed Sniffen, William Aila and University of Hawaii President David Lassner will be the ones to experience the backlash that is building.

What is that backlash? What we have seen, those of us who have been a part of the last week at the Pu‘uhonua ‘o Pu‘uhuluhulu, is a coming together of people who are fighting a 60-year-old economic plan — since statehood — that invites anyone with money to come and build what they wish even if it displaces and makes homeless a community of working people, even if it offends a people’s sense of place and sacredness. This tourist- and real estate investment- based economy has produced a larger population of residents and number of tourists, now at 10 million, than was even imaginable when this plan was first hatched in the 1950s. There has been no re-examination of this plan and certainly no bold new visions for transforming the economy. But there is discontent, serious discontent in Hawaii and that is the backlash that is rising.

The TMT is not a hotel, but it really follows in the same economic path of every major development in Hawaii: lots of money; construction opportunities; and downsides such as environmental degradation that are overlooked or hushed up during the permitting process. In a lot of ways TMT is exactly like our experience with Waikiki: take a beautiful, perfect place and build and build until someone makes you stop. This isn’t about science, this is just the state doing the only thing it knows how to do to keep the money rolling, and we need better leadership than that.

If you want to see leadership that looks to the future, that is disciplined, that is firmly grounded in aloha ʻaina and regard for the well-being of others, you should come to the mountain and see it for yourself. For the past nine days the kia‘i (protectors) at Mauna Kea have fed, educated and cared for hundreds of people a day and have exerted a calming focus that has impressed the state’s Division of Conservation and Resources Enforcement (DOCARE) officers assigned to remove them, and has even impressed the astronomers whose work is being forestalled. Then again, we believe that the astronomers know that this telescope doesn’t have to be built here, doesn’t have to embitter thousands of our people, doesn’t have to degrade our laws, playing fast and loose with regulatory agencies to get approvals. It can go where it is wanted.

It needs to go to La Palma in the Canary Islands, and we need to get on to business of investing ourselves in this land to rebuild our capacity to feed people, to reforest and rebuild sustainable agricultural and aquacultural systems even as climate change alters our ʻaina. We need to stop having to compete with billionaires for access to our resources and we need leaders with the vision and skills to make this possible. You will not find many of them in government now, but if you know where to look, you will find them at protests and public hearings, in classrooms and in nonprofit agencies across the islands. You will find them on the Mauna.

M. Noe Noe Wong-Wilson, Ph.D., is a Kanaka Maoli educator, cultural practitioner and executive director of Lalakea Foundation; Walter Ritte Jr., a Kanaka Maoli activist from Molokai, was a founder of the Protect Kahoʻolawe ʻOhana; Jonathan K. Kamakawiwoʻole Osorio, Ph.D., is a Hawaiian Studies professor and dean of the Hawaiʻinuiakea School of Hawaiian Knowledge.