Rhett Ayers Butler
When Jane Goodall died, the world didn’t just lose a scientist; it lost a moral compass. She had an uncanny ability to make people believe that what they did—however small—mattered. That conviction wasn’t sentimental; it was tactical. She understood that movements endure not on outrage alone but on the steady fuel of purpose. I first [Continue reading]
As the world’s attention turns toward COP30 in Belém next month, the story of Brazil’s Amazon is shifting—though not quite in a straightforward way. According to the government’s satellite monitoring system, INPE’s PRODES, deforestation in the “Legal Amazon” totaled 5,796 square kilometers in the 12 months ending July 31, 2025—an 11% drop from the previous [Continue reading]
Why did I choose a bisected nautilus for the Mongabay version of Why philanthropists should invest in independent journalism while I used a river delta for the blog version? The answer is I struggled to find a photo I’d taken that could represent this piece, so I decided to go metaphorical. Here’s my reasoning: Like [Continue reading]
Jane Goodall often said that hope was not the denial of difficulty, but the discipline of looking for what can still be saved. She refused to confuse optimism with naïveté. In her view, hope was a working tool way of holding on to agency amid the vastness of the world’s problems. A single chimp released [Continue reading]
The world’s forests tell two stories at once. Even as chainsaws advance, new trees are rising in their wake. More than 11 million hectares of tropical moist forest—an area roughly the size of Cuba—were in some stage of natural regrowth between 2015 and 2021, according to the Forest Declaration Assessment 2025. Latin America shows the [Continue reading]
With the World Conservation Congress meeting this week, I thought it was useful to revisit a study published earlier this year on conservation funding. For decades, conservationists have warned that the planet’s attention—and its purse—are skewed toward the charismatic few. A sweeping analysis of some 14,600 conservation projects over 25 years confirms that bias in [Continue reading]
A few weeks ago, I wrote about navigating conservation’s crisis. During Climate Week in New York, I joined discussions with grassroots leaders from the Global South that offered a sharper view of how philanthropy meets—and sometimes misses—the realities of frontline work. Their reflections highlighted dynamics that merit further exploration. Philanthropy is purportedly rooted in a [Continue reading]
The global renaissance of psychedelics is restoring once-taboo substances to scientific and cultural respectability. Yet as the world rediscovers their promise, it risks extinguishing the very species that make them possible. A new review by Anna Ermakova and Sam Gandy highlights an uncomfortable paradox: the search for psychological transformation is driving ecological decline. From the [Continue reading]
Long before humans built computers, nature built a better one. Razan Al Mubarak sees biodiversity as the planet’s original information network. In a commentary published on Mongabay, Al Mubarak, president of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, offers a framing that has stayed with me. She argues that biodiversity is not simply a collection [Continue reading]
I was quite surprised when Lúcia Lohmann, director of the Missouri Botanical Garden, reached out to inform me that the venerable institution would award me the Henry Shaw Medal. I’m deeply grateful for the recognition. The Garden has long stood as one of the world’s great centers of science and conservation. To be recognized by [Continue reading]
Over the years, Mongabay staff and contributors have conducted numerous interviews with Jane Goodall. The following is a recap of her ideas and reflections from these conversations, organized by theme—here’s the full piece. Gombe and the revolution in science Goodall overturned assumptions about what separates humans from animals, revealing chimpanzees as tool-makers with emotions, relationships, [Continue reading]
For most of its history, conservation has meant preservation: setting aside reserves, managing fisheries, and safeguarding livelihoods in ways that assumed tomorrow would look much like today. That assumption is no longer tenable. With global temperatures expected to rise by 3–5°C this century, the question is not whether ecosystems can be frozen in time, but [Continue reading]
In September 2025, James Marriott argued in Cultural Capital that we are entering a “post-literate society.” He traced how the eighteenth-century “reading revolution” seeded democracy, science, and civil society, and warned that the dominance of the smartphone and short-form video is now eroding the habits of deep reading that underpinned those gains. It is a [Continue reading]
For millennia, the rhinoceros stood as one of Earth’s great survivors, armored and immense, its bulk anchoring the landscapes of Africa and Asia. Today, it is perilously close to vanishing. A recent report by TRAFFIC and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) reads like a somber register of loss and resilience. It records [Continue reading]
Call it a crossroads. Ecological decline is accelerating in too many places at once; institutions that once limited the damage are wobbling; the information channels we rely on to coordinate action are clogged. In tropical forests alone, annual primary forest loss has climbed by 50% in the 2020s relative to the 2000s. Fires, drought and [Continue reading]
The latest tally from Global Witness is a grim ledger. In 2024 at least 146 people were killed or disappeared while defending land, water and forests. That brings the total to at least 2,253 deaths and disappearances since 2012, a steady toll that turns local acts of stewardship into mortal hazards. The report reads less [Continue reading]
The mountain gorilla should have vanished. In the late 1980s, mountain gorillas clung to survival in the misted borderlands of Rwanda, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Poaching, snares, and civil conflict made extinction feel like a timetable. What changed was not a miracle but a grind: rangers risking their lives to keep snares [Continue reading]
There is a place where the Amazon meets the Andes, where forests climb the lower slopes of mountains before giving way to the mists of the cloud forests. To stand there is to feel the weight of two great worlds converging. The immensity of the Amazon basin stretches out below, while above, the Andes rise [Continue reading]