Rhett Ayers Butler
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]
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]
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]
Want to raise money from foundations? It’s not just about persistence—it’s about speaking their language. When I first started seeking foundation support for Mongabay, I faced a wall of silence. No responses. When I was lucky, I got a “No thanks.” At the time, I thought I was taking the right approach. I targeted foundations [Continue reading]
David Bonderman, who died on Wednesday at the age of 82, was best known as a titan of private equity, acclaimed for turning undervalued companies into lucrative ventures. Over decades, his sharp instincts and strategic acumen at TPG Capital—formerly Texas Pacific Group—yielded control of firms as diverse as Continental Airlines, J. Crew, and Petco. His [Continue reading]
Since the early 2000s, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has invested more than half a billion dollars into efforts to protect the Amazon, making it the largest private donor of conservation efforts for Earth’s largest rainforest. The foundation has supported a range of interventions, including establishing protected areas and Indigenous territories, using technology to [Continue reading]
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic went global just over a year ago, there had been a notable shift in messaging from some of the world’s largest companies around their responsibility beyond profit maximization. A growing number of firms were making commitments to reduce emissions, diversify their leadership, and eliminate environmental degradation and human rights abuses [Continue reading]
Shortly ahead of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Mongabay spoke with Antha N. Williams, the head of the environment program at Bloomberg Philanthropies, the foundation launched by businessman and former New York city mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. During the interview, Williams discussed how Bloomberg puts data at the center of its programs, which on the environmental front [Continue reading]
A decade ago, the idea of using the financial resources of university endowments, religious institutions and philanthropic foundations as a mechanism to advance action on climate change was still in its relative infancy, mostly limited to college campuses. While divestment has been long used as a tool for activism, in the early 2010s, plenty of [Continue reading]
Conservation is complex. If it were easy, problems like the extinction crisis, human-wildlife conflict, overexploitation of forests and oceans, and habitat degradation and loss would be resolved already. Conservation’s complexity arises from the need to address multiple, often conflicting, objectives that span disciplines from ecology to economics to human welfare. Something that may seem straightforward [Continue reading]
This week, scientists from James Cook University in Australia announced the discovery of a previously unknown detached coral reef in the Great Barrier Reef. It was the first new reef to be discovered in the area since the late 1800s. The discovery was made by an underwater robot launched by a team aboard the Falkor, a research [Continue reading]
2020 was supposed to be the year that the world assessed progress on a decade’s worth of effort to stave off the sixth mass extinction — the first extinction driven by the activities of a single species — and set ambitious new targets for conservation. But the COVID-19 pandemic intervened, leading to postponement of the [Continue reading]
Bloomberg Philanthropies, the foundation launched by businessman and former New York City mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, is one of the world’s largest charitable organizations. According to the Foundation Center, the foundation’s $7.15 billion in assets in 2015 made it the 10th largest foundation in the United States that year. Bloomberg says it distributed $3.3 billion [Continue reading]