For Native Hawaiians, the protection of Mauna Kea is an ancestral responsibility to responsible land stewardship and a means of ensuring Mauli Ola, or a holistic sense of health and wellbeing.

Community members on the North Shore are dismayed and angered by the piling of large boulders against an ancient Hawaiian fishing heiau in the Kawailoa subdivision in Kapaeloa near Waimea Bay, Oʻahu.

NASA environmental findings mean that neither TMT nor any other development on Mauna Kea can be approved without being in violation of the Mauna Kea Conservation District rules and regulations.