The heart of genuine sadness: astronomers, politicians, and federal employees desecrate the holiest mountain of the San Carlos Apache

Whole Earth, Winter, 1997 by Peter Warshall

Apache and enviro hearts have been further poisoned by the University astronomers' refusal to consider, inside a legally established context, a comparison of the ecological, cultural, and astronomical values of alternative peaks. Little by little, each year from 1986 on, the angers grew and the windows for peace talks darkened. The natural environment increasingly turned into a hodgepodge of roads and firebreaks. Mythic orientations were challenged and subverted. Events multiplied. Back in the early 1980s, during the testing period for sky clarity, the Forest Service allegedly forgot to search the highest peak for shrines. By the time a stray piece of turquoise was unearthed in a small rivulet, a Mimbres (a disappeared people from about 800 CE) shrine site had been bulldozed for the astro-testing apparatus. Soon after, a renegade astronomer bounced his all-terrain vehicle up a trail (passed a "No ATV" sign) and illegally cut a spruce adjacent to another shrine in order to better align his instruments with a star. Small events but many, dozens, kept eating at the heart.

Speed, Power and the Sacred

Wolfgang Sachs, a world expert on technology, conservation, and development, has asked: How does speed impact ethics? Sometimes, the interaction of speed, the sacred, and power is obvious. In 1994, for instance, the University and the Forest Service sent a letter to the Apaches while the Tribal Council was away at a conference, telling them that they would cut the forest three days later. The Apaches returned to find the telescope site cut. "Desecrate first, then talk right-or-wrong" tilts the power play, limiting choices, forcing the enviro/Apache opposition toward more extreme measures like non-violent actions, monkey-wrenching, or property destruction. "Sorry," said the Forest Service, "we did not exactly follow the ninety-day notice period, but it is not legally binding anyway." Forest recovery takes 380 years.

Sometimes, control of timing is more subtle. Essentially in cultural hiding since the internment camps, the traditional Apaches took their time to speak in public about their desire to keep the peaks freer of human artifact and disturbance. Various medicine people had to talk together and convince themselves to reveal basically private religious knowledge. Both the Tribe and traditionals took their time before entering legal frays. Apache time is not time-aggressive. The result: the courts twice cited "laches" arguments by the University. The judges wrote that the Apaches had waited too long. Claims must be made with a speed "reasonable" to American courts, even if foreign to Apache culture.

Perhaps the most spectacular strategy of speed occurred in 1988. The University spent $1 million to attach a rider to the Arizona-Idaho Conservation Act. The rider eliminated the first three telescopes from all laws, environmental or cultural. The lobbying effort caught the environmental and human rights communities by surprise, blitzed through both houses with no committee hearings, passed Congress with no mention of the Apaches, and established the first exemption for a project on federal lands since World War II.