At Greenvoting, we seek to achieve the following objectives:

• Encourage the citizens of Wisconsin to become attuned to and involved in the environmental challenges that our state faces.

• Foster an understanding of the multiple facets of environmental issues, from the organizations advocating change, the events occuring around the state, the institutions and elected officials and their influence on the issues, to, of course, debate and research regarding the issues themselves.

• Provide information on those subjects that is objective, factual, and non-partisan.

• Make this information as accessible to the public at large as is possible while paying respect to the complexity that each issue carries with it.

• Serve the organizations already entrenched in the politics of environmental protection and those citizens looking to start new advocacy groups by providing the building blocks for successful efforts to affect change.
  

• Use the democratic model of citizen input and participation to foster meaningful discussion on the Wisconsin's environmental challenges and encourage member contribution to the website and the environmental cause as a whole.

We believe that the desires to live in a cleaner environment, to be good stewards of the land, and to raise healthy children and grandchildren are not principles defined by the boundaries of conservative or liberal ideology, but rather are almost universally conceived to be goods for humanity. Yet, the political system makes it difficult for people to demand such environmental protection. Far too often, we get piecemeal, temporary fixes that fail to incite any substantial progress towards conservation, economic sustainability, and environmental justice. As a result, most environmental issues are addressed in a limited, halting, and ultimately ineffective manner.

This is unfortunate, since the ideals of our political system are predicated on electing representatives to make sure that the resources of the government are put to the most humane, most just, and most equitable ends. Yet the pressures and rewards of office lead to actions that compromise those core principles. Rather than considering the consequences that the actions will bring in the near and distant future, the politics of our time favors a series of short term solutions and compromises that serve only to augment the electability and professional reputation of our public servants and to appeal to the most people at a given time, while forsaking the ends of social advancement and environmental improvement.

The American political system, as such, needs to work to alter the costs and benefits of governing to make such sacrifices more prohibitively expensive for elected officials. For every sacrifice that our elected officials make where the costs are borne by the environment, we constituents are then obliged to penalize them through the avenues provided by our democratic system. This is what we at Greenvoting wish to achieve.

With that purpose constantly in mind, we seek to achieve this end not through top-down organizational leadership, nor do we believe that environmental protection should be addressed in such a manner. These are issues that can only be addressed when citizens mobilize their own friends and neighbors and demand more from their elected officials.

Of course, an essential ingredient to effective social movements is the basic resource of knowledge. This knowledge is embodied by an acute awareness of the activities of local and state bureaucracies and institutions, in the major arguments and facts surrounding the issues, where one's own elected officials stand on environmental issues, which groups already are embroiled in environmental movement, and where and how one can get involved. Therein lies the purpose of Greenvoting. We seek to provide the aforementioned building blocks that, taken together, provide the requisite knowledge to be informed and to get involved. While our commitment to environmental protection is steadfast, we choose not to pontificate as a website about the major environmental challenges facing Wisconsin, letting our own opinions cloud the intricacies of the issues. While we realize complete objectivity is incredibly difficult to achieve, we nonetheless strive to provide information that is factual, explanatory, and descriptive. For example, rather than rate how well our elected officials have voted as many organizations do, we simply will list their voting records on the relevant bills and resolutions. This way, not only will we provide greater freedom for our visitors to come to their own conclusions, but others are then enabled to wield those facts to advance their own advocacy efforts.

This is not to say, however, that opinionated discussion is not welcome at Greenvoting. On the contrary, not only do we have a section set aside for opinion pieces written by the website's members, but included at the bottom of each page is a discussion thread, in which anyone is greatly encouraged to post their two cents on the topic covered there.

These goals cannot crystallize, however, without the involvement of our members. In fact, we chose to use the Wikipedia model provided by Wetpaint because it fosters a sense of community not unlike the professed ideals of American democracy. Just as democracy ceases to be in the absence of citizen participation in the processes of governance, Greenvoting depends on member contribution for not only the fulfillment of its current goals but to account for any issue that Wisconsin residents like you see as important but may not be completely covered here at this moment. No environmental challenge is too local or too minimal to be of concern to us. Any case involving the environment that even only a few citizens care about is important to all of us, and we would like to know more about it.

We would like to invite you to become a member of the Greenvoting community, to help us in our efforts to change the dynamics of environmental politics in Wisconsin, and, as a result, bring about the goals of environmental protection that we hold so dear. Your participation is what truly makes Greenvoting what we want it to be: an interactive website where Wisconsin citizens can come together to share knowledge and become informed about their environment. Welcome to our site.