I love this city and this country when you can email the Mayor of the capital, get a reasoned (if delayed) response and have things happen.

This is the follow-up from Kerry Prendergast regarding my question of how Wellington City Council is going to participate in this year’s Earth Hour:

Dear Mike

Thank you for your email of 10 January regarding Earth Hour.

I’m sorry it has taken a while to reply. We needed to wait until everyone returned from holiday to discuss the idea and make a decision.

You will be happy to hear that the Council is going to participate.

We are looking at getting the whole city involved. Certainly, for safety reasons, we will keep street lights, traffic lights and other essential lighting switched on – and obviously there’ll be situations where people will have to keep lights on.

But, the Council will switch off the tree lights in Oriental Bay; we’ll make sure all Council buildings are “switched off” – and we hope businesses might follow suit and switch off large neon signs and the like.

Thanks for taking the time to send the information.  We too hope it will serve to generate more thought and awareness about climate change, both locally and globally.

Yours sincerely
Kerry Prendergast

Wicked – and I’m sure Ray Apihene-Mercer helped out

And very quickly in response to my question of “Will there be any publicity (to Wellington companies especially) to let them know how they can help?”, this from Sharon Williams, (Senior Communications Advisor, Office of the Mayor):

Hi Mike

Kerry just asked me to respond to your latest email. I can confirm that we will be putting out a media release encouraging individuals and businesses in Wellington to support Earth Hour. I will make sure you receive a copy so you can publicise it on your blog.

Regards
Sharon

What can I say – pretty cool eh!

And now it’s your turn – SATURDAY 29th MARCH, 8pm-9pm – turn off everything you can but start with the lights.