Astronomers might once have considered themselves lucky to work so close to heaven. Now it seems a liability. High mountaintops in Arizona and Hawaii have become battlegrounds between scientists straining to improve their view of the Universe and traditional peoples who have scaled the same heights for centuries, seeking other kinds of knowledge.

A neutral observer might see room at the top for both. But the increasingly common clashes over sacred mountains such as Mauna Kea (see page 1015) are made vastly more difficult by the mutual suspicion and hurt feelings that are endemic to the politics of culture.

Hawaii, the last state to join the United States in 1959, has seen a resurgence of pride in traditional Polynesian culture in recent years. In 1993, the US government took the extraordinary measure of issuing an official apology to native Hawaiians for the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii 100 years earlier. Just this month, the state's two US senators, mindful of sentiment back home, reintroduced a bill in Congress to establish a quasi-sovereign Native Hawaiian government.

Having enjoyed mostly good relations with the 'Aloha State' for more than 30 years, scientists, who come almost exclusively from the mainland, are being swept along by this rising cultural tide. If Hawaiian traditionalists feel bullied by astronomers and their big, expensive machines, the scientists have had their own feelings hurt, and resent being lumped in with shopping-mall builders and golf-course developers as symbols of Western crassness. Many astronomers believe that they, too, are on a quest for truth and beauty.

So what is to be done? NASA, the US space agency (which, ironically, rarely dabbles in ground-based astronomy, and must wish it never had in this case), is following the right course. Frustrating as it surely is to be castigated in town meeting after town meeting, NASA managers should remain respectful of Hawaiian traditions, and continue their 'constructive engagement'. Astronomers familiar with the Mauna Kea issue admit that scientists could be more sensitive to the fact that they're working in someone else's church.

The native Hawaiian opposition, for its part, should recognize good-faith gestures when they're offered. And they should ask themselves: do we really want to drive these telescopes — which reveal a grandness to nature that our ancestors would have appreciated — off the mountain for ever?