One of the favorite parts of my job at NRDC is that I get to serve as publisher of OnEarth, our quarterly magazine. Beyond being able to work with a superbly talented team of editors and designers, what makes this piece of my job so pleasurable is that we engage in real journalism, breaking stories that typically show up in the mainstream media months or even years later.

Last summer, for example, OnEarth published one of the first stories about the modern-day plight of the honey bee. In the 12 months since our cover article appeared, the fate of the bees has been covered far and wide.

In a recent issue, Wired Magazine covered the phenomenon from the perspective of a scientist at the University of Montana who is wiring hives that he believes to be in the early stages of "colony collapse disorder," which is believed responsible for the deaths of billions of bees nationwide.

"Colony collapse disorder," Wired writes, "is bad news for anyone who eats."

In one particularly detailed section of the OnEarth article, author Sharon Levy writes about a bee keeper named Jeff Anderson who believes he knows what is killing his hives.

"One of the biggest problems is irresponsible use of pesticides and the failure of regulators to enforce the rules meant to protect bees from poisoning," Anderson said.

Levy writes:

Over the past few years, Anderson has become a reluctant expert on one particular pesticide, Sevin, and the quirks of the system meant to govern its use. In the summer of 1998, Anderson's hives were stationed on farmland next to hybrid poplar groves managed by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and the International Paper Company. Both sprayed the trees with Sevin to control infestations of the cottonwood leaf beetle, which damages poplars. Soon after, Anderson's bees began to die. He videotaped sick ones as they lay twitching, just outside their hive boxes, in the throes of nerve poisoning from the insecticide. The poisonings would continue long after a Sevin application, he says, because worker bees carried contaminated pollen back to the hive, where it affected the colony for months. More than 50 percent of his bees died.

Sevin is scarcy stuff. Also known as carbaryl, it is one of the most widely used broad spectrum insecticides. Two years ago, NRDC's health and toxics program led a coalition of public interest groups in petitioning the EPA to eliminate its use.

I checked with NRDC's policy staff for an update and the word was that "we sued EPA for failing to respond to our request to ban Sevin or carbaryl. We just settled that lawsuit with a deadline for them to make a final decision on it in the coming months."

So stay tuned. Maybe just maybe we'll have some good news soon.