Rhett Ayers Butler
Last Thursday I gave the keynote address at the Pacific Forest Trust’s Forest Fete gala. I spoke about four lessons I’ve learned over 27 years at Mongabay on how to reach and engage audiences: Identifying your audience (who you’re actually trying to reach) Framing (how the issue is presented) Narrative (what makes people stay and [Continue reading]
Conservation has never lacked alarming facts. What it increasingly lacks is attention. After years of grim headlines, many people do not just feel sad. They disengage. They stop reading, stop donating, and in some cases stop believing that anything meaningful can still be done. That reality is no longer a side issue for the movement. [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]
Last week at a Climate Week event organized by Sentient Media, I was asked to share an example of Mongabay’s reporting on an animal welfare issue. I spoke about an investigation into cattle ranching. The background: Cattle ranching is the single largest direct driver of deforestation in the tropics, responsible for 70–80% of forest clearing [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]
You can’t fact someone into caring. Facts inform, but stories move. That idea came up often last week during discussions at The Villars Institute. The science is clear: our planetary systems are under immense stress. Yet, we’ve failed—dramatically—to communicate that reality in ways that resonate with most people. The challenge is compounded by the worsening [Continue reading]
Sustainability officers are now an endangered species. This week, I spoke with a group of sustainability officers navigating a corporate landscape where terms like CSR, ESG, and climate change have become politically charged. Many companies are pulling back from public commitments on sustainability—not necessarily because the urgency has diminished, but because the risk of political [Continue reading]
At last night’s Climate One event, nearly 1,700 attendees, including more than 600 students and educators, gathered to hear Jane Goodall deliver a heartfelt plea for the future of our planet. In a conversation moderated by Greg Dalton, Goodall’s words pierced through the often numbing barrage of crises that dominate our daily news. “Please vote,” [Continue reading]