Rhett Ayers ButlerRhett 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.
On a recent trip, Mongabay board member Debby Ng shared a story that keeps replaying in my mind. It’s been 19 years since her account, but it still cuts raw. I’m sharing it because I’ve witnessed losses like this too. Debby had joined a team of scientists from the Raffles Museum of Biodiversity to salvage [Continue reading]
In the summer of 2024, searing ocean temperatures devastated much of Mesoamerica’s coral. But in Honduras’s Tela Bay, a reef known as Cocalito remains improbably intact—dominated by elkhorn corals so robust they scrape the water’s surface. The survival of this reef is baffling. Elkhorn coral (Acropora palmata), once common across the Caribbean, has declined by [Continue reading]
When Marielle Ramires disclosed her diagnosis of cancer in December 2024, she chose honesty without despair, revealing vulnerability but emphasizing resilience. Her approach was pragmatic, yet deeply hopeful. “I embraced my destiny,” she wrote, taking each step “one drop at a time.” For a woman who dedicated her life to articulating collective struggles, her illness [Continue reading]
In a packed event held in Palo Alto at the end of SF Climate Week, Willie Shubert shared a compelling example of how Mongabay’s journalism is making a real-world impact. He described how Mongabay’s consistent, beat-focused coverage helped prevent the deforestation of 535,000 hectares of Amazon rainforest in Suriname—an area equivalent to more than 15% [Continue reading]
In a modest home on the edge of Bogotá, a forest lived in exile. Its canopy no longer rustled with wind or birdcall, but was redrawn leaf by leaf from memory, with ink and conviction. It existed not on maps or in satellite imagery, but on sheets of paper, in the hand of a man [Continue reading]
The ocean has long been treated as the world’s forgotten frontier—out of sight, out of mind, and dangerously overused. Yet efforts to reverse decades of neglect are gathering speed. Last week saw the launch of Revive Our Ocean, a new initiative aimed at helping coastal communities create marine protected areas (MPAs) to restore marine life [Continue reading]
Yet in conservation, too many strategies are still chosen based on trends, intuition, or tradition—not on what science actually shows. A few weeks ago, I posted about this challenge and highlighted the Conservation Effectiveness platform. Now, a group of us, led by Zuzana Burivalova, has published a related paper: We’ve made Conservation Effectiveness open to [Continue reading]
20 years ago, I started Mongabay News with a laptop, a dream, and a sense of urgency — here’s what’s next. Last month marked 20 years since I started Mongabay’s news service. In those early days, it was just me—working from my apartment or traveling with a laptop, publishing articles primarily about tropical forests. My [Continue reading]
In a farmhouse overlooking the Upper Delaware River, Barbara Yeaman found her life’s calling later than most. At 70, when many were winding down, she set about founding the Delaware Highlands Conservancy, a land trust that would eventually protect more than 20,000 acres of forests, farms, and wetlands. It was, she often said, simply a [Continue reading]
In an age of noise and haste, Jim Brandenburg found greatness in patience. A single wolf mid-leap between ice sheets; a timber wolf peering shyly from behind a tree—his photographs distilled the wild into fleeting moments of clarity, and made him one of the most revered nature photographers of his generation. He died on April [Continue reading]
This month marks 20 years since I started the Mongabay news service. At the time, it was just me—writing, editing, and publishing from a desk with more ambition than resources. The idea was simple: provide consistent, fact-based environmental reporting that filled a gap I saw between advocacy groups and mainstream media. Coverage of tropical forests [Continue reading]
Much has already been written about the environmental legacy of Pope Francis. However, Justin Catanoso, who has long reported on the pontiff’s activism, does a commendable job capturing the Pope’s greenery in a recent write-up for Mongabay. Reflecting on the pontiff’s passing on April 21st at age 88, Catanoso notes that the world lost not [Continue reading]
It’s difficult to describe the feeling of standing beneath Auyán-Tepuí, that towering table mountain in southern Venezuela, except to say that something in me changed. In the mid-1990s, I visited this place—part of Canaima National Park—drawn by the allure of Angel Falls, the tallest waterfall on Earth. But nothing prepared me for the sheer presence [Continue reading]
For Ben Ochieng’ Ogodo, science was never a subject to be sequestered in ivory towers. It belonged in the hands of the people—decoded, demystified, and, above all, delivered with clarity and conviction. Across nearly three decades, he did just that: in newspapers and journals, in classrooms and workshops, in newsrooms stretching from Nairobi to London. [Continue reading]
In Reddipalli, a village tucked into the dry red soils of Telangana’s Khammam district, there lived a man who measured life not in years or wealth, but in saplings. By his own modest estimate, Daripalli Ramaiah planted more than ten million trees. For over six decades, he travelled—on foot, later by bicycle, and sometimes on [Continue reading]
At a time when traditional news outlets are shedding reporters and chasing clicks, Mongabay is bucking the trend: it’s growing. One key, says David Martin, our director of philanthropy, is that Mongabay isn’t selling ads or stoking outrage—it’s cultivating trust. “Our currency,” he told Mike DiGirolamo in a recent conversation, “is really impact.” Martin, who [Continue reading]
“Resilience means getting through something—tough, messy, with losses, but surviving.” So said Andrew Whitworth of Osa Conservation, summing up a growing shift in conservation thinking. As the planet hurtles toward a future 3-5°C warmer by 2075, holding the line is no longer enough. The goal now is to help nature endure what’s coming, reports Jeremy [Continue reading]
“We already knew that.” I frequently receive complaints from readers about findings in scientific papers being common sense or obvious. And yes, it’s true: science often confirms what we’ve long suspected or seen in practice. By its nature, science is slow and methodical. It doesn’t chase novelty for novelty’s sake. It seeks to verify, quantify, [Continue reading]
In a quiet corner of northern New York, the white pines of the Adirondack Forest Preserve rise like sentinels, untouched for over 125 years. Their silence speaks volumes. These towering trees—some 150 feet tall and over a century old—stand as evidence of a counterintuitive climate solution: do nothing. Well, not quite nothing. Proforestation, a term [Continue reading]
Since 1970, North America has lost 3 billion birds. The decline hasn’t stopped. Bird populations across the United States are plummeting, according to a new report from the North American Bird Conservation Initiative (NABCI) that paints a sobering picture of ecological decline. One in three species—229 in total—are now in urgent need of conservation. Among [Continue reading]
Life on Earth is changing—not just in numbers, but in essence Human activity is reshaping life on Earth in profound and alarming ways. A landmark study published in Nature offers the most comprehensive synthesis to date of how five primary anthropogenic pressures—habitat change, pollution, climate change, resource exploitation, and invasive species—are affecting biodiversity across all [Continue reading]
We’re planting trees — but losing biodiversity. Global efforts to restore forests are gathering pace, driven by promises of combating climate change, conserving biodiversity, and improving livelihoods. Yet a recent academic review warns that the biodiversity gains from these initiatives are often overstated — and sometimes absent altogether. Forest restoration is at the heart of [Continue reading]
Few apes have done more to unsettle human certainties than Kanzi. He was not the first non-human primate to use symbols to communicate, but he was the first to do so with such fluency, subtlety, and apparent ease that it prompted uncomfortable questions about the supposed uniqueness of human language, culture, and thought. Born in [Continue reading]
For months on end, he would maroon himself on remote islands—no phone, no company, no fanfare. Just a transistor radio, a hammock, and the possibility of seeing a turtle. It was enough. For Satish Bhaskar, the joy lay not in discovery as much as in the quiet act of observing: measuring tracks in the sand, [Continue reading]
Not all platforms are worth it After I shared the story behind Mongabay’s decision to deprioritize Facebook, several people asked: Where should impact-driven organizations focus their energy instead? There’s no one-size-fits-all answer. The best platform depends on your audience and what you want them to do with the information you share. Are you trying to [Continue reading]