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Rhett Ayers ButlerRhett Ayers Butler is the Founder and CEO of Mongabay, a non-profit conservation and environmental science news platform. He started Mongabay in 1999 with the mission of raising interest in and appreciation of wild lands and wildlife.
Deforestation proponents in Brazil routinely argue that cutting down the Amazon is an effective way to alleviate poverty. For example, the Bolsonaro administration’s official statement to the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference asserted that “where there is a lot of forest there is also a lot of poverty,” implying that forest cover is inversely […]
In September I met with Robin Hicks of Eco-Business to talk about Mongabay, non-profit media, and trends in environmental journalism. The resulting interview was published at ‘Page views are not real impact’: Mongabay founder Rhett Butler. A few excerpts from the interview: The challenge for newsrooms in finding the balance between gloomy environmental news and […]
In September I spoke with Innovation Forum’s Toby Webb about the latest trends in tackling deforestation in the world’s tropical forests. The conversation touched on the importance of including Indigenous and local communities in conservation efforts, the development of Mongabay’s tree-planting transparency tool, and more. Progress on deforestation: where are the chinks of light?
Next month BirdLife International, a global partnership of 115 organizations working to protect birds and their habitats, will mark its 100th anniversary by holding the BirdLife World Congress in London. The event will bring together scientists, conservationists, and other stakeholders from around the world. BirdLife has a lot to celebrate on its 100th birthday. It counts […]
Photos from a short visit to Wayqecha and Villa Carmen biological stations in the Kosnipata Valley in Cusco, Peru in July 2022. More photos available at: Flickr
In April, I formally joined the advisory council for the K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Bioacoustics will revolutionize biodiversity monitoring, transform how we evaluate the effectiveness of conservation, and create new opportunities to engage the public around wildlife and ecosystems. The K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation […]
In June 2022, I spoke with Aimée Christensen at the Sun Valley Forum on “Reporting on the State of Nature”. I talked about the origin of Mongabay; how Mongabay works; the current state of environmental journalism including trends, threats, and opportunities; and more. I also shared some of my nature and wildlife photos. Here is […]
In response to my recent LinkedIn post about Mongabay’s decision to deprioritize Facebook, a number of people have asked about Mongabay’s experience with LinkedIn. We started prioritizing LinkedIn as an outreach channel in the past few months, so I’m by no means an expert and can only share our early experiences with the platform. So […]
Ten years ago this month, we established Mongabay-Indonesia with a goal of increasing transparency and accountability in Indonesia’s forest sector. Mongabay-Indonesia would go on to lay the groundwork for Mongabay’s global expansion. The path to launching an Indonesian-language environmental news service was a serendipitous one. But I believed that Indonesia was an under-served market when […]
In 2016 we formally established Mongabay Latam, a Spanish-language environmental news service that aimed to improve coverage of critical planetary issues in the most biologically diverse region of the world. Five years in, Latam has greatly exceeded our hopes and expectations. Today Latam has monthly onsite readership that regularly exceeds 600,000, a network of contributing […]
Mongabay just hit 1 billion lifetime pageviews. It took almost 23 years. Here’s my key takeaway from the journey. One billion pageviews is a small number compared with platforms like YouTube and Facebook or mainstream news outlets like The New York Times, but for a niche provider of environmental news like Mongabay, the interest in our […]
The concept of “biocultural diversity” has gained wider prominence in recent decades as academics, institutions, and practitioners have expanded cross-disciplinary work at the intersection of human culture and biological diversity. Within the conservation realm, this trend has helped raise the profile of issues like Indigenous rights and traditional knowledge, especially since the mid-2010s as many […]
Meta is getting a lot of attention this week after it reported losing users for the first time in its history, resulting in its stock market valuation plunging $230 billion in a single day. As a nonprofit news organization that once relied heavily on Meta’s platforms for distribution – especially Facebook – this news isn’t […]
Mongabay persevered through the many challenges of 2021, continuing to publish high quality journalism and expand our impact. We ended the year stronger than we began it. Key numbers In 2021 we published nearly 5,000 stories in six languages covering more than 110 countries. This reporting attracted 54 million users to our website, including visitors […]
As a best-selling author, the co-founder of the award-winning Amazon Conservation Team, and an acclaimed public speaker, Mark Plotkin is one of the world’s most prominent rainforest ethnobotanists and conservationists. Plotkin has worked closely with Indigenous communities–including traditional healers or shamans–since the 1980s, first as an academic, then as a member of a large conservation […]
“How do I get my project covered on Mongabay?” As the founder of Mongabay, this is one of the questions I’m frequently asked. For those of you who don’t know Mongabay, we’re a non-profit conservation and environmental science news platform. The Mongabay newsroom is flooded with story ideas and pitches on a daily basis from […]
Today I spoke with Jameson Berkow at BNN Bloomberg about the impact of macroeconomic factors on tropical forests in 2022.
Between rising deforestation in the Amazon, new financial and political commitments to reduce deforestation, and growing interest in “nature-based solutions” like conservation and reforestation, 2021 may prove to be a fateful year for the world’s tropical rainforests. Take a look at The year in rainforests 2021, published last week, if you’d like to catch up on some […]
2021 was a year where tropical forests featured more prominently in global headlines than normal thanks to rising recognition of the role they play in addressing climate change and biodiversity loss. The following is a brief look at some of the major rainforest storylines from 2021. Tropical deforestation persists at a high level Despite speculation […]
It was a challenging year, but as 2021 draws to a close, I wanted to share a few highlights from Mongabay. Dip in traffic; big jump in engagementLike many news outlets, Mongabay experienced a dip in traffic relative to 2020 when lockdowns drove a surge in online activity during the first phase of the pandemic. […]
Research published in recent years has shown that Indigenous territories have experienced substantially lower rates of forest loss than non-Indigenous lands. Given that Indigenous territories account for at least 36% of the world’s “intact forests” and Indigenous Peoples and local communities (ILPC) live in or manage about half of the planet’s lands, these areas play […]
In 1986 a 24-year-old from Ohio named Daniel Katz set out to save tropical rainforests by creating a way for consumers to directly support more eco-conscious approaches to producing products from forests. With four others, he co-founded the Rainforest Alliance to develop a global certification standard for forest products and crops, which he hoped would create a […]
As a person who runs a conservation news outlet, I’m often asked by scientists, NGOs, community leaders, and others for tips on how to get journalists to cover their work. The quality of your work doesn’t necessarily translate to press attention: Many excellent initiatives and organizations get very little visibility. But you can increase the […]
10 years ago this month, I founded Mongabay.org with a mission to deliver news and inspiration from Nature’s frontline. The non-profit would build on the foundation established by Mongabay.com, the website I created in 1999. When I started Mongabay.org, I had no prior experience running a non-profit, no fundraising know-how, and few connections to foundations […]
This week I got away from my desk for an hour and captured some overhead shots from a nearby redwood forest. Below are the individual photos from the gallery