Rhett Ayers Butler
When Rainforest Action Network began in 1985, it had little of what usually makes an organization powerful. It had no large budget, no legal department, no steady access to politicians, and no formal way to force corporations or development banks to change. It had Randy Hayes, a wide activist network, a way to connect distant [Continue reading]
Conservation often sounds most persuasive when it is described as a plan. There are maps, budgets, governance models, community consultations, monitoring frameworks and theories of change. All are necessary. None is sufficient on their own. Luis Arranz, who has spent more than four decades working in Central African conservation, makes a simpler point: the hard [Continue reading]
Lisa Miller did not come to biodiversity finance through markets or models. She came through animals. Growing up in Australia, her interest in wildlife was personal and specific, long before conservation became a policy debate or an investment theme. That early pull led her to study zoology and later to work at the Australian Museum, [Continue reading]
Indonesia’s environmental challenges can feel overwhelming when taken as a whole. A country often said to contain more than 17,000 islands, it holds the world’s third-largest tropical rainforest—and a resource economy that has reshaped much of that landscape. For many Indonesians, modern development is experienced not in graphs but in the air around them: childhoods [Continue reading]
The first time Virgilio Viana saw the Amazon, he was a 16-year-old traveling with two school friends, moving along dirt roads, then continuing by boat as the forest rose around them. The trip set something in motion. It stayed with him through a forestry degree, a PhD on the region, and later a professorship in [Continue reading]
Chris Grinter has spent much of his life surrounded by insects—though not in the way most people imagine. As Senior Collection Manager of Entomology at the California Academy of Sciences, he oversees one of the world’s major insect archives, preserving everything from the smallest moths to the largest butterflies. His work supports the California All-Taxa [Continue reading]
California’s insects are as excessive as the state itself. Between its redwood forests and desert basins may live 60,000, perhaps even 100,000 species—though no one truly knows. That uncertainty drives the California Insect Barcode Initiative, an audacious attempt to document every insect in the state through DNA sequencing. Leading the effort is Austin Baker, a [Continue reading]
Before dawn breaks over Surabaya, Indonesia’s “City of Heroes,” Akhyari Hananto is already at work. After morning prayers, he opens Google Analytics to watch the night’s reading patterns unfold—what stories drew attention, which headlines resonated, and where curiosity faded. “That information often determines how I’ll prioritize my work for the rest of the day,” he [Continue reading]
“I knew I was disposable.” That realization, from earlier in his career, helps guide Willie Shubert today in building a kind and capable global newsroom. Shubert oversees Mongabay’s English-language newsroom—its largest—and shapes the organization’s global editorial strategy. His work ranges from deciding which forest to investigate next to building the conceptual framework for Mongabay’s model [Continue reading]
After decades spent protecting forests, fighting for human rights, and shaping climate policy, Nigel Sizer has turned his attention to what’s on our plates. As the new CEO of the Good Food Institute (GFI), he argues that how humanity produces meat may determine the future of both the planet and public health. “Our food system [Continue reading]
Tony Pritzker, heir to one of America’s storied business dynasties, treats environmental giving as a long-game engineering problem—not a moral crusade. In his experience, success depends less on symbolism than on methodical progress. From a recent conversation I had with him, here are five guiding principles for philanthropists seeking impact: Pick a clear target and [Continue reading]
When Saabira Chaudhuri began covering consumer-goods companies for The Wall Street Journal, she expected stories about marketing and product launches. Instead, she uncovered a deeper pattern: industrial ingenuity turned liability. Her new book, Consumed, explains how plastic became central to modern capitalism—and why efforts to rein it in have repeatedly faltered. Her reporting began in [Continue reading]
Ani Dasgupta has spent a career trying to make cities fairer and the planet more livable, first as an architect in training, then as a World Bank hand in the churn of post-disaster recovery, and now as President and CEO of the World Resources Institute. His path runs from Delhi’s informal settlements to Banda Aceh [Continue reading]
Carbon markets sit at the awkward junction of science, finance, and politics, where the appetite for simple stories collides with a system built on probabilities. Few reporters have spent more time in that junction than Steve Zwick. He came to climate through the trading pits of Chicago, where he watched how information asymmetries reward insiders [Continue reading]
The forests of northern Europe provided Tim Christophersen with his first education. As a child in rural Germany, he followed his grandfather on long walks among the trees. Fishing trips and mushroom hunts instilled habits of observation that shaped his later career. Today, after decades in international negotiations and corporate boardrooms, he still returns to [Continue reading]
Conservation for Kyriacou began not with policy papers or grant proposals, but with a tent in the backyard and an instinct to notice what was living around her. The founder of My Green World, a nonprofit that uses education and technology to promote environmental conservation, she arrived at the work through persistence, improvisation, and a [Continue reading]
As Mongabay expands its impact globally, few leaders embody its mission more fully than Maria Isabel Torres, the Program Director of Mongabay Latam. Based in Lima, Torres has spent the past nine years not only managing Mongabay’s Latin American bureau but also shaping its identity. Under her leadership, Mongabay Latam has grown into a regional [Continue reading]
In a world of quick wins and impatient headlines, Martin Goebel is playing the long game. Now Director for Mexico at LegacyWorks Group, a U.S.-based nonprofit, Goebel has spent five decades navigating the complicated terrain where conservation collides with community, politics, and development. Most of that time has been in Mexico, where he has witnessed—and [Continue reading]
For nearly two decades, Alejandro González has stood on the front lines of marine conservation in Mexico, from the coral-fringed reefs of Cabo Pulmo to the remote volcanic outposts of the Revillagigedo Archipelago. A biologist by training and a park director by trade, González has built a career navigating the tension between ambition and reality—between [Continue reading]
Reforestation has long been viewed as one of the more hopeful climate interventions: a process that can, in theory, restore degraded landscapes, absorb carbon dioxide, and support biodiversity. But as sociologist Thomas Rudel makes clear, the return of forests is rarely a passive process. His decades of research highlight a more complex truth—one in which [Continue reading]
For more than 30 years, Mark Erdmann has worked in some of the most remote and biologically rich marine ecosystems on Earth. A marine biologist by training and a conservationist by necessity, Erdmann has made it his mission to protect Indonesia’s reefs and mangroves—places many only dream of diving. Over the course of his career, [Continue reading]
The story of Astrid Puentes is rooted in the soil of Colombia. Born in Bogotá to a family with campesino roots, her earliest memories are of clean water, mountain air, and the quiet freedom of rural landscapes. “Being outside gave me the freedom and thus happiness that I could not have in the city,” she [Continue reading]
Shark conservation is not a field for the faint of heart. It pits biology against commerce, sentiment against symbolism, and science against entrenched bureaucracies. Sharks themselves—apex predators honed over hundreds of millions of years—are now among the most imperiled inhabitants of the oceans. Vilified in pop culture, sliced up for their fins, and managed more [Continue reading]
In the often fractious landscape of environmental discourse, S. Gopikrishna Warrier is a steadying presence. As the editorial director of Mongabay-India, Warrier has spent the past seven years cultivating a newsroom that brings light, not heat, to India’s environmental challenges. His calm authority, born of nearly four decades in journalism and communications, has helped steer Mongabay’s [Continue reading]
Sandhya Sekar never intended to lead a newsroom. Trained as an ecologist, with a Ph.D. in the sciences and a later pivot into journalism, she simply followed her curiosity—first as a writer, then as an editor, and eventually, as the founding program director of Mongabay India. In the process, she helped create one of the country’s [Continue reading]