Mission

Introduction

Sustainable development—development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs—is crucial to the long term survival of our planet.

To achieve the aim of sustainable development there must be a fundamental reorientation in our relationship to the rest of the environment; a conscious restraint in our use of natural resources and the burdening of the environment.

The movement worldwide and in New Zealand towards a knowledge and information based society presents real opportunities to encourage the transition to development that is sustainable.

Mission Statement

To utilise the communication and information sharing potential of the Internet to promote and facilitate ecologically sustainable development in Wellington.

Aims

To motivate and empower communities and individuals to work to achieve sustainable development in Wellington through:

• The development of an environment/conservation electronic community network which will encourage activism.
• Building and maintaining relationships within the environment/conservation community.
• Maximising opportunities for groups and individuals to work together and share resources.
• Encouraging the participation of communities in the management of social change.

The Sustainable Wellington Net will be part of a growing changing community and it will in turn evolve to meet the needs of this community. We aim to assist the realisation of a vision of sustainability that is relevant to the new millennium.

Principles

The Sustainable Wellington Net will achieve these aims by:

• Providing support for groups to find their own solutions.
• Recognising and supporting the need for social, cultural, and political diversity.
• Recognising the status of Māori as tangata whenua (native people) and their role as kaitiaki (guardians).
• The use of democratic decision making procedures in all our operations.
• Recognising the linkages between social, economic and environmental issues and the importance of social and economic equity in achieving sustainable development.
• Facilitating access to the Sustainable Wellington Net to as wide a community as possible.

This Site

The concept of this site grew out of a wider proposal for a physical ‘Green Centre’ in Wellington. The aim of this centre is to promote and facilitate sustainable development in Wellington on an individual, community, business, and governmental level.

As realities of funding meant that the physical Green Centre was going to be a long term project other options for promoting the aims which could be achieved in a shorter time frame were looked at. It was decided to use the potential of the Internet to set up a ‘virtual centre’, which could fulfil many of the functions of a physical centre but at a level of cost that made meant it could be set up very quickly and maintained relatively easily. In January 1999, Sustainable Wellington Net went live.

This web site is designed around the following goals:

• To be fast and not graphics intensive
• To display correctly and be usable in any browser (including text only ones)
• To comply with the latest HTML specification
• To be friendly to people with disabilities

This site was hand coded using the TextWrangler text editor on an Apple Macintosh, with a FileMaker Pro database for maintaining the links.