Kia ora koutou, Greetings everyone. Welcome to Sustainable Wellington Net's Newsletter #11. In this newsletter we have site news, enhanced park-and-ride facilities, online train timetables, an update on the Wellington trolley buses, Tinakori Hill (almost) added to the Town Belt, pizza boxes are now recyclable, the usual updates on the West Coast forests and Genetic Engineering, and a book review of Global Spin. SITE NEWS More work on the Wellington Green Map, particularly Best Walks, Bicycle Sites, and Traditional (Maori) Ways of Life. Can you spot any mistakes or omissions? WELLINGTON INCREASES RAIL PARKING From the Sustainable Transport Network Newsletter #10. Eighty more car parks have been opened this month at Waterloo railway station to meet increasing demand from rail users. Growth in patronage on all of Wellington's rail lines is high, and further parking is required at a number of other stations including Petone, Upper Hutt, Paraparaumu, Paremata, and Featherston. Wellington Regional Council has developed the parking spaces as part of its role in proving quality passenger transport infrastructure under the Regional Land Transport Strategy. Other rail infrastructure improvements on the drawing board include improving facilities at the Wellington bus-rail interchange and proving better pedestrian connections from the Wellington railway station through the city. For more information contact: Tony Brennand, Wellington Regional Council. E-mail: Anthony.Brennand@wrc.govt.nz TRAIN TIMETABLES ONLINE This slightly hard-to-navigate web page contains train timetables, pricing, and a brief overview of each line for Johnsonville, Masterton, Melling, Palmerston North, Paraparaumu, and Upper Hutt. Includes details of services to the WestpacTrust Stadium. TROLLEY BUSES The Regional Council has just renewed it's contract with Stagecoach for Trolleybus services. The contract runs through until the end of 2004. Some work will be done over that period to determine the future of the Trolleybus service in Wellington because major maintenance of the overhead will be necessary by then. From Dave Watson, Divisional Manager Transport, Wellington Regional Council. TINAKORI HILL PURCHASE A STEP CLOSER FOR WELLINGTONIANS Extracts from a WCC press release . Wellington City Council has given the go-ahead to purchase the city face of Tinakori Hill, to add to Wellington's Town Belt. Close to 19 hectares of land on the eastern slopes of Tinakori Hill will now be subject to a confidential offer by the Council following two years of negotiations with Telecom, the current owners of the land. Councillor Andy Foster, chair of the Environment and Recreation Committee, says the deal is close to being finalised with Telecom, and needed last night's sign off by the Council to progress a sign off with Telecom within the next few weeks. "Tinakori Hill is an enormously important addition to the town belt because of its diverse mix of open grassed areas and native bush clad slopes. The site contains the most extensive and intact area of regenerating native forest on Tinakori Hill. It links in with Tinakori Hill's tracks and walkways, effectively linking and amalgamating several areas of Council-owned town belt in the area." "Probably the most critical element in the purchase is that it protects this highly visible green hillside from any prospect of any housing development." Funding for the deal has come from the Council's reserves fund, which set aside $5 million last year to purchase land such as Tinakori Hill and Owhiro Bay Quarry for the community. Support for the deal has also come from the Friends of the Town Belt and the Wellington Tenths Trust. For further details contact Councillor Andy Foster, Chair of the Environment and Recreation Committee, phone 934 9220 or Janine Holland, External Communications, phone 801 3114 RECYCLING PIZZA BOXES Are you a pizza fan? The Wellington City Council now accepts pizza boxes in the recycling bins - but scrape them clean first - mouldy cheese and stale crusts are not recyclable! WEST COAST FORESTS Straight after the November 1999 election the new coalition government cancelled state owned enterprise Timberlands West Coast Ltd's beech logging scheme. On 15 May 2000 the government announced its decision regarding the remainder of logging of publicly owned native forests, including 'unsustainable' rimu logging in the Buller District of the West Coast (known as the 'Buller Overcut') and so-called 'sustainable' rimu logging in other West Coast forests, the most notable being North Okarito and Saltwater forests in South Westland. The government announced that: 1. the Buller Overcut will stop at the end of 2000, 2. logging of all other publicly owned native forests will stop on 31 March 2002 (eight months before the next election), 3. it will give the West Coast $120m to assist with economic development (largely as compensation for ending the logging). The previous government had already adopted a policy of stopping the Buller Overcut at the end of 2000 knowing rimu supplies will be almost completely depleted well before then. Timberlands have also announced they will stop logging Orikaka Forest (the last forest containing large supplies of rimu in the Buller Overcut) by September 2000 "when the kiwi breeding season begins". This is merely a PR exercise - great spotted kiwis (the only species in the area) actually begin breeding in July and Timberlands have been logging at a rate which suggests rimu supplies will be almost completely depleted by September 2000. Also, September marks the beginning of the rainy season, which inhibits logging activity - Timberlands have traditionally avoided logging during this season anyway. See Native Forest Action's website for more information . BIOTECH IN TROUBLE 2 recent issues of Rachel's Environment & Health Weekly have covered genetic engineering. Extracts follow, but note this is a US of A publication, so information about McDonald's, etc, may not apply here. Read the full articles at and . ... For five years the GE food industry has been saying GE foods couldn't be labelled because it would require segregating GE from non-GE crops - a practical impossibility, they said. However, in December 1999, Monsanto announced that it had developed a new strain of rapeseed (a crop used to make canola cooking oil) that might raise the levels of vitamin A in humans. How could consumers identify (and pay a premium price for) such a product if it weren't labelled? Obviously labelling will become possible - indeed, essential - when it serves the interests of the biotech corporations. ... For its part, the U.S. government has steadfastly maintained that labelling of GE foods is not necessary - and might even be misleading - because traditional crops and GE crops are "substantially equivalent". For example, the government has maintained that Monsanto's "New Leaf" potato - which has been genetically engineered to incorporate a pesticide into every cell in the potato, to kill potato beetles - is substantially equivalent to normal potatoes, even though the New Leaf potato is, itself, required to be registered as a pesticide with U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). ... Investors are not the only ones turning away from genetically engineered foods. The WALL STREET JOURNAL announced in late April that "fast-food chains such as McDonald's Corp. are quietly telling their french-fry suppliers to stop using" Monsanto's pesticidal New Leaf potato. "Virtually all the [fast food] chains have told us they prefer to take nongenetically modified potatoes", said a spokesperson for the J.M. Simplot Company of Boise, Idaho, a major potato supplier. The JOURNAL also reported that Procter and Gamble, maker of Pringles potato chips, is phasing out Monsanto's pesticidal potato... A spokesperson for Burger King told the WALL STREET JOURNAL that it is already using only traditional potato varieties. ... NEW ZEALAND MAY HAVE TO GO IT ALONE ON GE LABELLING News bite from from Green Party . The Australian Agriculture, Fishery and Forestry Minister today said the Australian Government would not support labelling if it put Australian businesses at a competitive disadvantage so New Zealand may have to opt out of the ANZFA Treaty and adopt an independent labelling system for all genetically engineered food. BOOK REVIEWS: GLOBAL SPIN David Weinstein, Co Convenor of the Wellington Green Party, sent us this book review: This new addition of the startling 1997 book by New Zealander Sharon Beder, now with two new chapters, hits you with a wallop. She answers the question of why, if things all REALLY so bad, why don't we really notice and why aren't we doing enough about it? Although some would put her in the conspiracy theory wackos category, Ms Beder serves up a convincing case that a group of wealthy transnational and industrial interests are successfully manipulating our society's response (or lack thereof) to planetary environmental crisis. While some will dismiss Beder's case out of hand, the reader cannot fail to be moved by well researched and exhaustive illustrations of how Big Oil and Big Industry have waged a deceptive campaign to confuse the public and policy-makers over environmental issues. DON'T BE A STRANGER! Our Calendar page always has interesting talks and events. _ Hei kona mai, Goodbye for now.