Rhett Ayers Butler
I recently spoke with Maurice Oniango for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford about Mongabay’s evolution from a personal rainforest website into a global environmental newsroom. One theme we discussed was how journalism models shape coverage itself. Advertising-driven media often pushes outlets toward scale, speed, and broad audience [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]
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]
The arrival of generative artificial intelligence has unsettled journalism in familiar ways. Traffic models look fragile. Copyright is contested. The marginal cost of producing words has collapsed. It is tempting to conclude that news is becoming less valuable just as machines become more fluent. So far for Mongabay, the opposite is happening. AI systems are [Continue reading]
For a movement so often framed by loss—and confronting a particularly difficult moment—conservation is relearning how to talk about itself. This shift may signal something deeper than messaging: a recalibration of what persuades people to care, to fund, and to act, especially as the world edges toward 2030 amid ecological strain, political volatility, and thinning [Continue reading]
For most of my career, I’ve tried to ensure that people have the information they need to make decisions that safeguard nature. Yet the people whose choices often matter most for forests, fisheries, and wildlife are usually the least served by conventional media. Farmers, fishers, Indigenous land stewards, and community leaders often operate in what [Continue reading]
People often say that good journalism requires a 30,000-foot view. I’ve found the opposite to be true. The stories that move the world rarely start in boardrooms or at summits; they start with someone standing knee-deep in a mangrove swamp, notebook in hand, asking a fisherman what has changed. At Mongabay, we built a network [Continue reading]
The struggle to protect nature is also a struggle to explain it. Forests, reefs, and rivers are disappearing faster than our ability to explain why. In many places, those best positioned to tell these stories lack mentorship, funding, or editorial backing. For emerging journalists—or those pivoting from other beats—the gap between curiosity and capability can [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]
“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]
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]
Like many mission-driven newsrooms, Mongabay is deeply concerned with whether our journalism makes a difference. We measure success not by the size of our audience but by what our stories enable—better governance, empowered communities, more resilient ecosystems, and the spread of innovations. Tracking those ripples has been a priority since Mongabay’s founding, and today it [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]
The forest in northern Gabon didn’t look like a battleground. It was a patchwork of hunting trails and village paths, home to fruit trees and ancestral graves. When a logging concession encroached and the community of Massaha protested, their pleas traveled poorly through official channels. Then the story was reported, documented and read by people [Continue reading]
For the first fifteen years of Mongabay, I wrote almost constantly. I was reporting from nature’s frontlines, producing investigative pieces, and drafting analytical articles at a relentless pace. Writing was my craft, my joy, and my connection to the world. But when Mongabay transitioned into a non-profit, I knew something would have to give. The [Continue reading]
In the tangled thickets of Brazil’s Amazon, a place known as much for its impenetrable forest as its opaque networks of corruption, Lúcio Flávio Pinto has spent nearly six decades cutting a solitary trail. For most of that time, he did so with little more than a pen, a dogged sense of duty, and a [Continue reading]
They are not yet gone. But for thousands of species, the earth is already holding its breath. A new review in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment confirms what conservationists have long suspected: over 10,000 species now sit on the precipice, listed as Critically Endangered by the IUCN, the final designation before vanishing from the wild [Continue reading]
It was not the first time the Vietnamese authorities accused someone of tax evasion. But few such cases have ended in a five-year prison sentence. Fewer still have involved a man whose life was defined by public service: An environmental lawyer who trained young attorneys, comforted poisoned communities, and helped rewrite the nation’s environmental laws. [Continue reading]
I often return to this series of images, which I took in Jambi, Indonesia, in 2022. At first glance, it seems to capture something hopeful: a full-circle rainbow arcing over a lush green landscape. But look closer, and you’ll see what lies beneath the beauty—a vast palm oil plantation, carved out of what was once [Continue reading]
This month marks 20 years since I started the Mongabay news service. At the time, it was just me—writing, editing, and publishing from a desk with more ambition than resources. The idea was simple: provide consistent, fact-based environmental reporting that filled a gap I saw between advocacy groups and mainstream media. Coverage of tropical forests [Continue reading]
At a time when traditional news outlets are shedding reporters and chasing clicks, Mongabay is bucking the trend: it’s growing. One key, says David Martin, our director of philanthropy, is that Mongabay isn’t selling ads or stoking outrage—it’s cultivating trust. “Our currency,” he told Mike DiGirolamo in a recent conversation, “is really impact.” Martin, who [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]
One year after completing Mongabay Africa’s environmental journalism grants, a cohort of Sahel-based journalists has taken the initiative to form the African Network of Francophone Environmental Journalists (RAJEF). Officially launched on February 26th, the network aims to strengthen environmental reporting across Francophone Africa, beginning with a fact-checking training session. The six founding members, hailing from [Continue reading]
On the evening of Jan. 5, Mongabay journalist Gerry Flynn was denied entry to Cambodia while returning from a vacation. Immigration officials at the airport told Flynn that he is “permanently banned” from Cambodia because there was “an error” on a document submitted as part of his last visa extension application. He was subsequently forced [Continue reading]
Make deforestation newsworthy. That’s a core principle behind much of the work we do at Mongabay. We’re not as eye-catching as a Greenpeace protest, like that pictured above, but we persistently report on it. I highlighted this as one of our key strategies during a talk on Friday at the 31st Annual Conference of the [Continue reading]