Happy Birthday to Us - 30 Years and Counting

With this issue, we're 30 years young. Magazines -- especially these days -- come and go, or shrink in size, or in their ambition. But OnEarth has thrived while remaining true to its mission: publish fresh analysis of the environment, with rigor and originality. We share much of the DNA of our parent organization, NRDC: no surprise there, since the organization and OnEarth were founded by the same indomitable, visionary man, John Adams. We're feisty; we have a strong point of view, yet we believe facts and data are more powerful than ideology or politics. We can be wonky, but we're guided by our instincts and our hearts. We know how to tell a good story. And we possess an undying devotion to the planet and its endless capacity to uplift and inspire.

This essential credo has remained the foundation of NRDC and the magazine since it launched in 1979 as The Amicus Journal, in recognition of the organization's basic function and make-up at the time: NRDC was then a relatively small group of scrappy lawyers who sued polluters and, when necessary, the government to make sure it enforced a new generation of environmental laws -- such as the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts -- that NRDC helped create.

Both NRDC and its magazine have evolved in the ensuing decades, but the ties between them and their shared mission remain strong. Through this special relationship, OnEarth has consistently broken ground on new and underreported stories. We were the first national publication to document the strange, mysterious disappearance of bees and to consider the possible causes; we explored the implications of a society that purchases three billion prescription drugs per year, which, once ingested and disposed of, enter our water supply; we probed the unexplored risks of nanotechnology, which is fast becoming a $3-trillion industry, though it is almost entirely unregulated. We could go on. Our work has been recognized by many awards, anthologized, and picked up by other media.

We regularly tackle big stories, like this issue's cover article on the public-health implications of a new wave of climate-related diseases, by KIM LARSEN. But we also love smaller, more quirky tales, like the one by contributing editor ALAN BURDICK, who writes about an iguana-loving taxonomist revolutionizing the art and science of classifying all the known species on our planet -- on the Web; or the one by RICK BASS, another contributing editor, about his trek through the French Pyrenees in search of the region's last surviving brown bears. Over the years, we have sent our award-winning correspondents and photographers far and wide, from Bangladesh to Mali, from Inez, Kentucky, to Snake Valley, Nevada.

Like most 30-year-olds, we still feel youthful and robust, curious and irrepressible, and we are even going through some new life changes on the Web. Green fads have come and gone; so have environmental magazines. But we're still here, and it seems we have more stories than ever to tell.