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CounterPunch
February
1, 2003
Star Whores
Astronomers
vs. Apaches on Mount Graham
by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
We waited for a night when the moon was obscured
by clouds. It sounded like a silly plan here in the heart of
the Arizona desert, where Oregonians stream each year to worship
the unrelenting sun.
But the wait was only two days. Then
the sky clouded up, just as the Apaches predicted. These weren't
rain clouds, just a smoke-blue skein, thin as morning fog, but
dense enough to dull the moonlight and shield our passage across
forbidden ground.
We were going to see the scopes. The
mountain was under lockdown. Armed guards, rented by the University
of Arizona, blocked passage up the new road and patrolled the
alpine forest on the crest of Mount Graham. Only certified astronomers
and construction workers were permitted entry. And university
donors. And Vatican priests.
But not environmentalists. And not Apaches.
Not at night, anyway. Not any more.
Yet, here we were, skulking through strange
moss-draped stands of fir and spruce, displaced relics from a
boreal world, our eyes peeled for white domes and trigger-happy
cops.
It says something about the new nature
of this mountain, this sky island, that we heard the telescopes
before we saw them, a steady buzz like the whine of a table saw
down the block.
The tail-lights of SUVs streamed through
the trees, packing astronomers and their cohorts towards the
giant machine eyes, on a road plastered over the secret middens
of the mountain's most famous native: the Mount Graham red squirrel.
The tiny squirrel was once thought be
extinct. In 1966, federal biologists said that they had found
no evidence of the squirrel in the Pinaleno Range (the strange
mountains of which Mount Graham forms the largest peak) since
1958. Then five years later a biologist working in the shaggy
forests at the tip of the mountain found evidence of at least
four squirrels. A wider survey showed an isolated population
on the mountain's peak. In 1987, the squirrel was finally listed
as a endangered species.
Still, the squirrel population fluctuates
wildly from year to year, in cycles largely tied to the annual
pine cone crop. But these days the population spikes rarely top
500 animals on the entire planet-which for them constitutes the
upper flanks of Mount Graham, the same swath of forest claimed
by the astronomers. But the trendlines for the squirrels all
point down: down and out. And the astronomers just keep coming.
And so do the clearcuts. The new campsites. The unnatural fires.
Extinction looms.
We edged along the road, under the cover
of a beauty-strip of fir trees, until we came to a fence, tipped
with razored wire, and beyond it a clearing slashed into the
forest. And there before us crouched one of the mechanical space-eyes,
set within a white cube, sterile as a hospital. The structure
is so cold and lifeless that it could have sprung from the pen
of Richard Meier, the corporate architect responsible for the
dreadful Getty Museum blasted onto the crest of the Santa Monica
mountains outside LA.
My guide calls himself Vittorio. "That's
Vittorio with a 't'," he says. "Like the Italian director."
But he calls himself Vittorio in honor of the great Apache leader
Victorio. He was 19 when I met him in the mid-90s, hip deep in
snow, at a place called Enola Hill in the Cascade Mountains fifty
miles or so from Portland. Enola Hill is a sacred site for many
of the tribes of the Pacific Northwest-a bulge of basalt covered
with Douglas-fir, where from a narrow thrust of rock you can
look up a fog-draped canyon to Spirit Horse Falls and beyond
to the white pyramid of Mount Hood.
Enola Hill has been a vision quest site
for centuries. But the Forest Service, despite brittle platitudes
from Bill Clinton about his sensitivities to native peoples,
schemed to blast a road through the heart of the hill and clearcut
it to the bone.
Vittorio haunted the forests of Enola
Hill for weeks, along with a few dozen other Indian activists
and environmentalists, bracing themselves in front of dozers,
cops and chainsaws. Some were hauled off to jail; others, like
Vittorio, faded into the forest, to fight another day. But eventually,
the Forest Service had its way. The logging roads went in and
the trees came down. But the experience brought us together.
It is a friendship sealed in sorrow and anger. And humor, too.
Vittorio, who studied art at UCLA on what he calls "a guilt
and pity scholarship", is not a grim person. He has a wicked
sense of humor and an unerring eye for beauty.
Vittorio mainly grew up in east LA. His
mother died young in a car crash with a drunk driver outside
Safford, Arizona when he was five. Vittorio was in the car and
he still bares a scar, a purple semi-colon hanging above his
left eye. He was taken in by his grandmother, a Mexican-American.
For a time she cleaned the house of Jeff Chandler, the cross-dressing
actor who once played Cochise.
Vittorio's father is a San Carlos Apache
from Tucson. He went off to Vietnam, came back shattered in his
head, and addicted to smack. It wasn't long before he ran into
trouble. He is now parked in the bowels of Pelican Bay, the bleak
panopticon-like prison in northern California, another victim
of the state's merciless three-strikes law.
"My old man was born with two strikes,"
Vittorio said. "Just like the rest of us. But after Vietnam,
he couldn't run and hide anymore."
That's been the fate of too many Apaches
since whites invaded their lands: chased, hunted, tortured, killed,
starved and confined. And then blamed for the misery that had
been done to them. The Apaches have been relentlessly demonized,
perhaps more viciously than any other tribe. Here's how General
John Pope described them in 1880: "a miserable, brutal race,
cruel, deceitful and wholly irreclaimable." This description,
of course, bears little relation to the Apache, but is a fairly
apt portrait of their tormentors.
But that's how they were treated, as
irreclaimable subhumans, even after they agreed to submit to
life on the reservations. Young Apache men were forced to wear
numbered badges, just like the Jews of Nazi Germany. Minor violations
of arbitrary rules, such as the ban on drinking Tizwin, an Apache
homebrew, meant exile to Leavenworth, often a death sentence.
Apaches weren't recognized as citizens until 1924. They were
prohibited from worshipping their religion until 1934 and couldn't
vote until 1948.
But still they resist and their resistance
earns them even more rebukes from authorities and locals yahoos.
Until the 1960s, it wasn't uncommon to see signs outside stores,
diners and bars throughout southern Arizona saying: "No
dogs or Apaches Allowed." Now, ain't that America?
In the hip-deep snow on Enola hill, Vittorio
told me this story about his namesake, the great Chihenne chief,
Victorio. "Victorio was revered by his band and by most
other Apaches," Vittorio said. "When he was gravely
wounded by federal troops during a raid on his camp in the Black
Range, the soldiers called on the Chihenne women to surrender,
probably so they could be raped and then sent to their deaths.
The women shouted back their refusal and vowed to eat Victorio's
corpse should he die, so that no white man would see his body
or abuse it."
At the time, the Mexican government had
put out a $50 bounty for each Apache scalp and offered the then
grand sum of $2,500 for the head of Victorio. The Apache leader
survived the battle of the Black Range, but was eventually tracked
down, ambushed and killed in the mountains of Chihuahua.
* *
*
In the spring of 2002, Vittorio invited
me to Arizona to tour the San Carlos Reservation and make a covert
visit to the Mount Graham telescopes. At the time, the University
of Arizona was in the midst of constructing the $87 million Large
Binocular Telescope, billed as the largest optical telescope
on Earth.
That's right $87 million. Put this outlandish
figure in perspective. That's double the entire annual income
of all Apaches in Arizona. The astronomers and priests have never
experienced anything approaching life on the San Carlos Reservation,
where grinding poverty is the daily fare. And it's been that
way since the beginning in 1872, when this bleak patch of land
along the Gila River was established as a reservation/prison
by the grim Indian killer Gen. George Crook.
The non-treaty Apaches have always hated
the place for its brackish waters, infertile soils and robust
population of rattlesnakes. The site was a malarial barrens where
many Apaches died of what the Army called "quotidian intermittent
fever." Here's how Daklugie, the son of the great Chiricahua
leader Juh, recalled the early days of life on the reservation:
"San Carlos! That was the worst
place in all the great territory stolen from the Apaches. If
anybody ever lived there permanently, no Apache knew of it. Where
there is no grass there is no game. Nearly all of the vegetation
was cacti; and though in season a little cactus fruit was produced,
the rest of the year food was lacking. The heat was terrible.
The insects were terrible. The water was terrible. What there
was in the sluggish river was brackish and warm. At San Carlos,
for the first time within memory of any of my people, the Apaches
experienced the shaking sickness."
Of course, that was the point. The Army
and the Interior Department weren't on a humanitarian mission.
The reservations, especially for the Apaches, were always more
like concentration camps carved out of the most desolate terrain
in a barren landscape. American death camps. Black holes on Earth.
And so 140 years later, San Carlos remains
one of the poorest places in the nation. The per capita income
is less than $3,000. More than 50 percent of the people who live
there are homeless. More than 60 percent are unemployed. Less
than half the Apaches have a high school diploma and only one
in a hundred Apache kids percent go on to college. The University
of Arizona, so anxious to defile a sacred Apache mountain in
the pursuit of science, has done almost nothing to help the dire
situation at San Carlos, except to raid the reservation for cultural
artifacts and to submit the people there to remorseless interrogations
by university anthropologists.
***
Our way up Mount Graham seemed simple
enough when tracing the route on the map. We traveled logging
roads, traversed deer and bear trails and made a steady bearing
up a crumpled ridgeline toward the forests of Emerald Peak. Naturally,
I was lost within an hour.
Perhaps, it had to do with the otherworldliness
of the ascent, moving out of searing desert through chaparral,
scrublands and finally into ever deeper forest. As the astronomers
trained their lenses deep into the past toward the light of dead
stars, we walked through a living relic; the journey up the slopes
of the mountain was a trip back into ecological time.
Mount Graham is a sky island, a 10,700-foot-tall
extrusion from the floor of the Sonoran desert, which has traveled
its own evolutionary course since the last ice age, more than
10,000 years ago. The mountain is a kind of continental Galapagos,
featuring seven different biomes, stacked on top each other like
an ecological flow chart.
At the very top of the pyramid (and the
mountain) is a cloud forest of fir and spruce, the southernmost
manifestation of this biome. This is an ancient forest, as stout
and mossy as the fabled forests of Oregon. That's where the squirrels
hang out. Of course, the forests has been gnawed at over the
years by loggers and the like, but there was still more than
600-acres of it left when the astronomers laid claimed to the
area, with the ironclad brutality of a mining company.
From an ecological point of view, the
astronomers couldn't have picked a worse site in Arizona-partly
because the only rival to Mount Graham, the densely forested
San Francisco Peaks north of Flagstaff, holy ground for the Hopi,
has already been defiled by ski slopes and powerlines. There
are more than 18 plants and animals that are endemic to Mount
Graham. There are nine trout streams tumbling off its slopes.
Numerous cienegas, those strange desert marshes. Rare northern
goshawks and Mexican spotted owls. And more apex predators, cougars
and black bears, than in any other place in the desert Southwest.
When you've got the big predators, it usually a sign the ecosystem
is humming along in a functioning state-an all-to-rare condition
in the American West these days.
But there's a problem. And it's a big
one. It is the curse of ecological islands to suffer from high
extinction rates, even in a relative natural state. But when
outside forces, such as clearcuts, powerlines, roads, and telescopes,
rudely penetrate the environment these rates soar uncontrollably.
The reason is fairly straightforward:
the species that live in these isolated habitats have evolved
in a kind of vacuum and aren't equipped to handle the shock of
such drastic changes to their living quarters. And there's another
complicating factor. When endemic animals and plants are wiped
out by chainsaws and bulldozer, there's no nearby population
to fill the void: a sea of hostile desert separates Mount Graham
from the archipelago of sky islands arcing through northern Mexico
and southern Arizona.
In a way then, the plants and animals
of Mount Graham share this striking vulnerability with the Apache
people, who, although masters of desert life and highly skilled
warriors, had no ultimate defense against the waves of disease
and alien technology marshaled into their realm by whites.
* *
*
Mount Graham attracted astronomers for
the some of the same reasons it harbors unique wildlife and is
revered by the Apache: it is wild, remote, tall and steep. Indeed,
although it's not the tallest mountain in Arizona, Mount Graham
is the steepest, rising more than 8,000 feet off the desert floor.
The University of Arizona fixed its attentions
on Mount Graham in the early 1980s. It had gotten into the astronomy
game in the 1920s and had put observatories on several of the
peaks in the Santa Catalina Mountains outside Tucson, including
Mount Lemmon, Mount Hopkins and Kitt Peak.
The University's Seward Observatory touts
itself as one of the top astronomy centers in the world. It not
only mans observatories, but also has its hands in the lucrative
business of building and polishing the giant mirrors used by
modern telescopes.
But the star-gazing business is akin
to the expanding universe: staying on top means constantly building
new scopes, claiming new, higher peaks, extending your empire.
The University's Seward Observatory had
run into another problem. The observatories closest to Tucson
had become increasingly less efficient over the years, the image
quality marred by smog and light pollution. So they went looking
for a new peak and quickly settled on Mount Graham, a 100 miles
northeast of Tucson. Of course, they told the Apaches nothing
about their intentions.
It turns out that Mount Graham isn't
a very good place to probe the secrets of the heavens. There
are updrafts of warm air pushing off the desert that distort
the images, making them as jittery as the first snaps that came
back from the Hubbell space telescope. Plus, Mount Graham is
a sky island and though it rises out of one of the driest stretches
of land on the continent it is often cloudy on the peak.
"Any Apache could have told the
astronomers that," says Vittorio. "It is a stormbringer
mountain, summoning up all the moisture from the desert below,
pooling it at the peak in a nimbus of clouds."
In fact, the University of Arizona knew
that Mount Graham was a poor choice for the deep space telescopes
from the beginning. In 1986, a team from the National Optical
Astronomy Observatory conducted a two-year investigation comparing
Mount Graham and Mauna Kea, Hawai'i as possible telescope sites.
The Arizona peak fell far short. "There was no comparison,"
concluded Mike Merrill, an astronomer at the NOAO. Indeed, the
study advised that there were 37 other sites ranking better than
Mount Graham for observing stars-even the smog-shrouded Mount
Hopkins topped Mount Graham.
This troublesome bit of news didn't deter
the University of Arizona. In 1988, it announced plans to turn
Mount Graham into a kind of astronomical strip mall, featuring
seven telescopes at a cost of more than $250 million. They rounded
up a bevy of partners, including the Vatican, several universities
in the US and Europe and the odious Max Planck Institute, which
in an earlier incarnation as the Max Planck Society gave assistance
to the murderous experiments of Dr. Mengele.
This peculiar consortium ran into immediate
legal hurdles, the biggest being the small Mount Graham red squirrel.
It was a now federally protected endangered species and its last
refuge was the very cloud forest the astronomer's claimed for
their avenue of telescopes. Federal biologists announced that
the project would jeopardize the squirrel's very existence. It's
not hard to figure out why they reached this conclusion. The
observatory scheme would destroy nearly 30 percent of the squirrel's
best remaining habitat.
But the University wasn't going to let
extinction stand in the way of science. It took an aggressive
and belligerent approach. Officials badgered and intimidated
federal biologists and when they wouldn't back down the University
and its lawyers went over their heads. For example, in May of
1988, the University summoned Michael Spear, then regional head
of the Fish and Wildlife Service, to a closed door meeting at
the Tucson airport, for a session of backroom arm-twisting. Spear
emerged a few hours later having agreed to order agency biologists
to conclude that the telescopes could go forward regardless of
the effect on the squirrels. Which is, in fact, what they did.
"Procedurally, it was incorrect,"
Lesley Fitzpatrick, a US Fish and Wildlife biologist, later testified.
"And it was in violation of the law, and therefore it is
incorrect regardless of whether its procedural or substantive."
In other words, the Fish and Wildlife
Service had committed a fraud and everyone there knew it while
they were doing it. And they got caught and even then it didn't
matter. Why? Well, a diminutive squirrel doesn't pull at the
heartstrings of most Arizonas, who seemed unruffled at the fact
that the state's rarest species was slated to become political
roadkill.
More tellingly, the University got its
way because it has powerful politicians in its pocket, ranging
from Bruce Babbitt to John McCain, and they used them relentlessly,
especially the vile McCain.
The university tapped McCain to push
through congress the so-called Idaho and Arizona Conservation
Act of 1988. This deceptively-titled law was actually a double-barrel
blast at the environment: it gave the green light to illegal
logging in the wildlands of Idaho and for the construction of
the Mount Graham telescopes, shielding them from any kind of
litigation by environmentalists or Apaches. To help sneak this
malign measure through congress, the University shelled out more
than a half-million dollars for the services of the powerhouse
DC lobbying firm Patton, Boggs and Blow.
The bill passed in the dead of night
and, in the words of one University of Arizona lawyer, it gave
the astronomers the right to move forward "even if it killed
every squirrel".
It also exempted the project from the
National Historic Preservation Act and other laws that might
have made it possible for the Apaches to assert their claims
to the mountain, giving the University of Arizona the dubious
honor of becoming the first academic institution to seek the
right to trample on the religious freedoms of Native Americans.
In the spring of 1989 with the squirrel
population in freefall, the Forest Service, which oversees Mount
Graham as part of the Coronado National Forest, began to raise
questions about the project. Worried that the astronomers' road
might spell the squirrel's demise, Jim Abbott, the supervisor
of the Coronado forest, ordered a halt construction at the site.
The delay infuriated McCain.
On May 17, 1989, Abbott got a call from
Mike Jimenez, McCain's chief of staff. Jimenez informed Abbot
that McCain was angry and wanted to meet with him the next day.
He told Abbott to expect "some ass-chewing". At the
meeting, McCain raged, threatening Abbott that "if you do
not cooperate on this project [bypassing the Endangered Species
Act], you'll be the shortest tenured forest supervisor in the
history of the Forest Service."
Unfortunately for McCain, there was a
witness to this encounter, a ranking Forest Service employee
named Richard Flannelly, who recorded the encounter in his notebook.
This notebook was later turned over to investigators at the General
Accounting Office.
A few days later, McCain called Abbott
to apologize. But the call sounded more like an attempt to bribe
the Forest Supervisor to go along with the project. According
to a 1990 GAO report on the affair, McCain "held out a carrot
that with better cooperation, he would see about getting funding
for Mr. Abbott's desired recreation projects".
Environmentalists lodged an ethics complaint
against McCain, citing a federal law that prohibits anyone (including
members of Congress) from browbeating federal personnel. The
Senate ethics committee never pursued the matter. When the GAO
report, condemning McCain, surfaced publicly, McCain lied about
the encounter, calling the allegations "groundless"
and "silly"
In 1992, environmentalists Robin Silver
and Bob Witzeman went to meet with McCain at his office in Phoenix
to discuss Mount Graham. Silver and Witzeman are both physicians.
The doctors say that at the mention of the words Mount Graham
McCain erupted into a violent fit. "He slammed his fists
on his desk, scattering papers across the room", said Silver.
"He jumped up and down, screaming obscenities at us for
about 10 minutes. He shook his fists as if he was going to slug
us. It was as violent as almost any domestic abuse altercation."
Witzeman left the meeting stunned: "I'm
a lifelong environmentalist, but what really scares me about
McCain is not his environmental policies, which are horrid, but
his violent, irrational temper. I wouldn't want to see this guy
with his finger on the button."
* *
*
Despite lawsuits and fierce protests,
including a daring attempt to block the access road to by a
young Apache mother named Diane Valenzuela, who suspended herself
from a tripod, the Vatican and Max Planck scopes went up.
Then the opponents began another tact:
a global campaign against universities seeking to invest in the
Mount Graham Observatory. It was brilliantly executed and wildly
successful. More than 80 universities announced they would have
nothing to do with the observatory and 50 prominent European
astronomers signed a letter requesting that the project be halted
"so that the unique environment and sacred mountain of Mount
Graham can be saved." Even the Max Planck Institute scaled
back its investment.
All of this began to wear on the head
of the Mount Graham project, Peter Strittmatter, the chief astronomer
at the University's Seward Observatory. He lashed out repeatedly
at the Apaches and greens, referring to them as "essentially
terrorists." That's an old slur for the Apaches, going back
to the conquistadors, and an increasingly common one for environmentalists.
(By the way, Strittmatter's special focus is the all important
subject of "Speckle Interferometry.")
But the University pressed on, deploying
tactics that seemed cribbed right out of the Dow Chemical Company's
playbook: they brought in former FBI agents, including veterans
of the bureau's noxious COINTELPRO operation, to train campus
police; they tried to infiltrate and disrupt opposition groups;
and they hired a pr firm to write phony letters, supposedly drafted
by Arizona students, to local papers attacking the Apaches and
the enviros.
Then in 1993 the astronomers finally
confronted the technical problem that had loomed for so long.
The original site for the Large Binocular Telescope was simply
untenable. It was too windy and too cloudy. So the astronomers
announced they were going to move it to a new site on the mountain,
even deeper into the forest.
The enviros and Apaches argued that this
sudden change in plans would reactivate environmental laws that
had been neutered by the 1988 legislation. But in the pre-dawn
hours of December 3, the University unleashed a pre-emptive strike:
they clearcut 250 old-growth trees on the new site before the
environmentalist could get before a judge. They didn't even tell
their own biologist, charged with monitoring the project's impacts
on the red squirrel. He found out about it on the evening news.
When the environmentalists finally got
into a federal court, the judge agreed with them and halted the
construction of the big scope, ruling that the project needed
to undergo a formal environmental review. The university appealed
and lost.
Then in 1996 they turned to President
Clinton. Despite Clinton's pledges to protect the environment
and honor the religious practices and sacred sites of Native
Americans, he bowed to the demands of the University and signed
another piece of legislation overturning the court injunctions
and shielding the new site from environmental review and litigation.
So even when you play by the rules and win, you can still lose
through political connivance and trickery. It's a lesson the
Apaches learned long ago.
So work on the big scope resumed, followed
by the construction of a 23-mile long powerline corridor up the
flank of the mountain. By 2003, he sacred mountain of the Apache
had been fully electrified.
***
As we crept through the lush montane
forest to the crest of the mountain, Vittorio pulled a small
pouch from his pocket. He said it was a medicine bundle that
he wanted to bury at the telescope site.
"What's in there?" I asked.
"Sage and sweetgrass?"
"Hell, no," he chuckled. "Squirrel
shit."
"Uh," I asked nervously. "Do
squirrels carry Hanta virus?"
"One can always hope."
He dug a small trench beneath the fence,
slid the pouch under, buried in it fir needles and said something
in Apache that I couldn't begin to transcribe, though it sounded
more like a curse than a prayer.
"The priest said if they spotted
aliens in those scopes, it would be their mission to convert
them," Vittorio said, speaking of Father George V. Coyne,
the head Vatican astronomer. "But they are the aliens here
and they're too fucking self-righteous realize it."
Here's a taste of Father Coyne's cosmic
eschatology: "The Church would be obliged to address the
question of whether extraterrestrials might be brought into the
fold and baptized. One would want to put some questions to him,
such as: have you ever experienced something similar to Adam
and Eve, in other words, original sin? Do you people also know
a Jesus who has redeemed you?" And this spaced-out priest
has the nerve to denounce the Apache religion as primitive?
The Apache know Mount Graham as Dzil
nchaa sian, Big Seated Mountain. The mountain is an anchor point
of the Apache cosmology, as vital to their tradition as Chartres,
the Wailing Wall or the temples of Angkor Wat. It orients the
world, presages the weather, nurtures healing plants and serves
as a sanctuary from bands of killers, so often riding under the
auspices of the Church. What more do we require of holy places?
That they be handmade? Commissioned?
Ironically, that's the position of the
Catholic Church. Coyne himself has sneered that unless there
are physical relics on the site it can't really be considered
sacred, except as a kind of paganistic nature worship which the
church finds anathema.
"Nature and Earth are just there,
blah!" the cosmic priest wrote. "And there will be
a time when they are not there[The Apaches and militant greens]
subscribe to an environmentalism and religiosity to which I cannot
subscribe and which must be suppressed with all the force we
can muster."
Of course, over the past four hundred
years the Church has done it's damnedest to eradicate any remnant
of Apache culture: villages, clothing, language, ceremonies and
the Apache themselves.
"On this mountain is a great life-giving
force," declared Franklin Stanley, a San Carlos medicine
man, in a 1992 as the bulldozers prepared to dig the footings
for the scopes. "You have no knowledge of the place you
are about to destroy."
But the priests manning the $3 million
Vatican Advanced Technology telescope dismissed Franklin and
the other Apaches. They prevented Apache leaders from meeting
with the Pope and even went so far as to suggest that were being
used as part of a Jewish conspiracy. "The opposition to
the telescopes and the use of Native American people to oppose
the project are part of a Jewish conspiracy that comes out of
the Jewish lawyers of the ACLU to undermine and destroy and undermine
the Catholic church," the Rev. Charles Polzer told Indian
activist Guy Lopez in 1992. Polzer, a Jesuit priest, was the
curator of ethnohistory at the Arizona State Museum. "Two
Phoenix doctors, Robert Witzeman and Robin Silver, are examples
of this conspiracy," Polzer told Lopez.
Polzer was as wrong about Witzeman and
Silver as was about the sacred nature of Mount Graham. Witzeman
is a Lutheran; Silver is a Mormon. Silver has been a friend of
mine for many years. He's also the busiest man I know. He's a
gifted tennis player, an emergency room physician, a father and
the most prolific environmentalist in the Southwest. "Apaches,
Jews and greens we're all the same to the Church and the University
of Arizona," says Silver.
The astronomers even made it illegal
for the Apaches to conduct prayer ceremonies on the summit without
a permit and arrested Wendsler Nosie, a member of Apaches for
Cultural Preservation, when he exercised his constitutional right
to pray there without one.
"These space priests have the same
old prejudices that the inquisitors did back when they went after
Galileo," says Vittorio. "What's bizarre is that the
tables have turned. Now the Church is being used by the scientists
to legitimize their rampages. They even have the gall to name
their sacrilege the Columbus Project."
Several universities, including the University
of Minnesota and Virginia, offered to buy off opposition from
the Apaches. It didn't work. "They're asking us to sell
our spirit," said Wendsler Nosie. "The answer is 'no,
we don't want anything they're offering to us financially.'"
***
In October of 1992, I attended a Columbus
Day rally against Mount Graham at the University of Arizona's
Seward Observatory outside Tucson. As an Apache leader was giving
a speech, a goon squad of University police charged into the
crowd, tackled and tried to drag away one of the Native American
student leaders. Robin Silver, who among his other pursuits is
a first-rate photographer, began clicking shots of the assault.
Then the cops turned their attention on him. He was arrested
and his camera seized.
Silver wasn't there to protest, but to
document. Still, the University cops recognized him immediately
as a chief nemesis. Since 1988, there's been more than a dozen
lawsuits filed against the telescope project. Silver has had
his hand in crafting most of them. Unlike many environmentalists,
Silver also deals honestly and respectfully with Native Americans.
For the university, this is a dangerous
mix. And they've repeatedly tried to discredit Silver in the
press and with politicians. When that didn't work they sent their
cops out to intimidate him. But emergency room physicians don't
scare easily and the arrest blew up in the face of the University-Silver
also knows how to work the press.
But the university (surely one of the
sleaziest institutions in the US) didn't relent. In 1993, it
hired the Snell & Winter law firm to dig in to the possibility
of filing racketeering charges against environmentalist and Apache
opponents of the telescopes. And on and on it goes.
Why would the university go to these
extreme lengths? Well, the Mount Graham telescope complex isn't
just about the pursuit of "pure science"-as if any
science could ever be pure-or, as one astronomer put it, "peering
through the dark avenues of time to witness the creative spark
of the Big Bang."
Astronomy isn't a benign science. Indeed,
it's impossible to separate the discipline from its unseemly
ties to military applications. Galileo's first telescopes were
designed for the war lords of Venice, who used them to spot enemy
ships and troops. The giant mirrors that power the Mount Graham
scopes have also been touted for their dual use nature: both
as stargazers and as a potential component in the Star Wars scheme,
wherein the mirrors would reflect laser-beam weapons on satellites
and incoming missiles.
Of course, it's also about money. Lots
of money. And we're not just talking about the enormous cost
of the project. Telescopes are big business. The investment partners
for the Mount Graham Observatory are selling viewing time for
$30,000 a night. And this figure will climb when the Large Binocular
scope goes online-if it does. Then there's the stream of federal
research grants, guided to them by political patrons such as
McCain, which the University hopes will tally in the tens of
millions a year.
"These guys don't just have stars
in their eyes," quips Vittorio. "They've also got dollar
signs."
Robin Silver calls them simply "the
Star Whores."
All in all, the maligned art of astrology
does rather less harm and provides a good deal more human solace.
*
* *
"Hey, you, assholes!" We'd
been discovered. "Freeze, dammit!"
A green tunnel of light swept towards
us, like a dragnet scene in a bad James Cagney movie. A corpulent
cop rumbled toward the fence, dragging a bum leg and carrying
what looked to be an assault rifle.
"This way," Vittorio whispered
and took off running. I jogged after him as he bounded through
the forest like a bear harassed by hornets. He descended a rough
deer trail, then cut cross country, topping a razor-thin ridge
and down into a cove of moss-bearded spruce. I stayed within
sight of him for a few minutes, but soon lost him in the darkness,
as my lungs began to seize. I'm a lowlander and the 10,000-foot
altitude took its toll with a vengeance.
Exhausted and disoriented, I tripped
over a downed tree and plunged headfirst into a snow bank. Suddenly,
I felt overcome with doom. I laid there in the snow, gasping
for air that wasn't there, waiting for the fat cop with the club
foot and the rubber bullets to come haul me away to some shithole
in Tucsonor worse.
"Psst. Down here." Vittorio
to the rescue once again.
He was crouching in a narrow gorge, about
20 feet below me. I pulled myself out of the snowbank and worked
my way down into the ravine. We walked a few hundred yards in
silence, absorbing the intoxicating vanilla-like scent of the
forest, until the gorge came to an abrupt end at a cliff, towering
a few hundred feet above a broad flank of the mountain below
us.
We sat down on the ledge, our feet dangling
in a kind of space. A rush of air from below warmed our faces.
The sky had cleared of clouds. To the west, the desert rolled
on in the darkness beneath us toward the Galiuro and Santa Catalina
Mountains and the distant flickering tumor of Tucson.
"Look!" Vittorio whispered,
pointing to the midnight sky, suddenly streaming with stars.
"How much closer do we really need to be?"
Jeffrey St. Clair can be reached at: stclair@counterpunch.org.
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