Not all opportunities are worth taking.
In 2010, a high profile literary agent approached me with an enticing offer: Write a book about my journey and the environmental trends shaping the world. It was the kind of opportunity many dream of—a chance to share my perspective, to build my profile, to hold a finished work in my hands.
But as I dove into the project, a simple calculation emerged. Writing the book would take time, but marketing it would take even more—perhaps 80% of the effort, I learned, would go into book tours, interviews, and promotion. And for what? If everything went exceptionally well, maybe it would sell 50,000 copies. Meanwhile, Mongabay was already being read by well over 100,000 people every day.
The choice was clear: if I wanted to maximize the impact of my time, writing a book probably wasn’t the way to do it. Raising my personal profile wasn’t a priority for me—I was more interested in effecting meaningful change where it mattered than in gaining visibility. A book could wait.
At the time, I had been reporting extensively in Indonesia, where I saw how opacity, corruption, and mismanagement contributed to environmental damage like deforestation, overfishing, and pollution. But I also recognized journalism’s power as an intervention—by increasing transparency, it could increase accountability. And yet, no single Indonesian-language environmental news service connected the country’s vast archipelago. There were important local and regional efforts, but nothing that spanned from Aceh to Papua.
So instead of writing a book, I took a different risk. I started a nonprofit.
It wasn’t an easy decision. I knew that stepping into this role meant stepping away from what I loved—journalism itself. Running a nonprofit meant fundraising, managing operations, and building an organization from the ground up. I had no experience in any of it. No connections to wealth. No background in philanthropy. No sales skills. Just a belief that it was worth trying.
So I applied for grants and I got one. And then, piece by piece, Mongabay evolved into something bigger than I had imagined.
Impact, I’ve learned, isn’t about personal recognition. It’s about making choices that prioritize what matters most. Sometimes, that means walking away from the obvious path and building something new instead.
