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Media appearances

Appearance on Mark Brand’s BETTER podcast

Last year I talked with Mark Brand, a social-impact entrepreneur, chef, and systems designer who is committed to ending hunger. I met Mark at the Sun Valley Forum, where we both spoke.

Today I learned that the podcast episode featuring our conversation aired in July 2022. You can hear it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever podcasts are available.

Here’s a description of the episode:

Rhett Butler is an award-winning journalist whose reporting is actively saving rainforests. I met him at a climate conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, and immediately felt pulled to the sense of hope and action that exists in his work as the founder and CEO of Mongabay—a non-profit Conservation & Environmental Science news platform that has been raising human awareness of both wild lands and wildlife for 20+ years.

“I didn’t have a big vision,” he said. “I just achieved little things along the way. Then you wake up 20 years later and…”

I jumped in to finish his sentence because Rhett is humble, but his work is not. The power of the information he’s gathered has impacted the livelihood of our planet in profound ways.

His platform, Mongabay, is special for so many reasons, but one, in particular, is that it allows other outlets to use its information, its storytelling, research, data, science, all for free—and, in that act, Mongabay has successfully aided in the preservation of precious ecosystems and changed the very fate of our planet more than once.

This episode is a double-triple listen in that it gives us tangible mental health tools that can actively turn our climate despair into the hope we need to create planet-saving action.

It’s also a visual listen. We get to see inside the very real threat environmental defenders, like Rhett and his team, experience globally. You’ll hear stories that will make the hair on your forearms spiderweb all the way up, with visuals that take you into the environments he protects and then back with information to armor you for the fight of preserving our existence here on Earth.

We get real on the issues and talk misinformation (the WHY and the WHO) and then dig into what each of us can do to level up our information intake in a way that protects us all from mistruths.

We get all of this alongside the very real hope that rises up when we dedicate ourselves to local acts of change. And if you know me, if you know this show, you know one thing: solutions are my love language.

Let’s go.

By Rhett Ayers Butler

Rhett Ayers Butler is the Founder and CEO of Mongabay, a non-profit conservation and environmental science platform that delivers news and inspiration from Nature's frontline via a global network of local reporters. He started Mongabay in 1999 with the mission of raising interest in and appreciation of wild lands and wildlife.