Rhett Ayers Butler
Ahead of this week’s Philanthropy Asia Summit, Thomas Knudsen and I published a commentary in the Business Times on Singapore’s outsized role in the future of the ocean Debates about ocean protection tend to focus on treaties, national policies, and international agreements. Fisheries quotas are negotiated between governments. Shipping rules are set through global bodies. [Continue reading]
“Your work is not a priority for us.” This is one of the most common responses I hear from philanthropic foundations. Silence is more common still. I understand why a foundation might decline to fund a particular organization or project. What concerns me is a broader pattern: philanthropy consistently underinvests in the information ecosystem that [Continue reading]
In Washington, scrutiny is a familiar condition of public life. Yet even by that standard, the recent exchange between the House Committee on Natural Resources and the Center for Biological Diversity has a distinctly uneasy tone. What began as congressional oversight of litigation over major resource projects has broadened into sweeping requests for internal communications, [Continue reading]
It is tempting, when thinking about change, to look for the actor at the center of the story. The donor whose gift made something possible. The organization whose strategy unlocked progress. The individual whose decision altered a course of events. These figures are easy to name and easier still to photograph. They offer a sense [Continue reading]
Heading into COP30, where tropical forests are set to be a central theme, it seemed worth looking today’s trajectories a little further forward and imagine where they might lead. Part 1 looked at possible fates of tropical forests. Part 2 is published here. The first act of the forest crisis was destruction. The second, if [Continue reading]
Heading into COP30, where tropical forests are set to be a central theme, I thought it would be interesting to consider today’s trends and imagine where they might lead. What follows are brief scenarios—some unlikely, others already taking shape for tropical forests. The vanishing state: Across parts of the Amazon, authority is slipping away. Illegal [Continue reading]
The catalytic role of independently verified information When a logging concession in Gabon threatened a community’s ancestral forest, their appeals to officials went nowhere—until the story was reported. Once the facts reached the public record, the environment minister revoked the company’s permit and moved to legally protect the forest, officially recognizing a community’s stewardship. The [Continue reading]
More than eight hundred years ago, Maimonides wrote that the highest form of giving is to make charity itself unnecessary. That wisdom feels newly relevant today, as questions about power and purpose continue to shape modern philanthropy. Last week Laurene Powell Jobs revisited the idea, warning that too often wealth becomes a substitute for participation. [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]
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]
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]
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]