Rhett Ayers Butler
@rhettayersbutler.bsky.social
Founder of Mongabay, a platform that delivers news & inspiration from Nature's frontline via a global network of reporters. I'm not very active on this platform. You can find me on LinkedIn and/or follow Mongabay's BlueSky account.
Pat Lowe, who died on July 2nd, 2026, aged 84, was a psychologist, writer, naturalist, editor, and longtime defender of the Kimberley in Western Australia. news.mongabay.com/2026/07/pat-...
Pat Lowe spent decades describing and defending the Kimberley
The termites had built their towers long before roads crossed the Kimberley or companies proposed industrial projects along its rivers and coasts. Their colonies worked beneath the red earth, altering...
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Marine ecologist Mohammed Abu Daya has continued studying endangered spinetail devil rays from a tent in Gaza after losing his home, office, and access to the sea. His work shows why conservation often depends on local scientists. Reporting by Lyse Mauvais. news.mongabay.com/short-articl...
The Gaza scientist still tracking manta rays from a war zone
Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. Mohammed Abu Daya is a marine ecologist from Gaza. His work focuses ...
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David Page, writer and public-lands advocate, died in a car accident on July 7th, aged 57 news.mongabay.com/2026/08/davi...
David Page wrote about the mountains and worked to protect them
A backcountry ski run can depend on decisions made years before the snow falls. Forest plans determine where motorized vehicles may travel. Congressional appropriations affect whether trails are maint...
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To mark its ten years of providing environmental news across Spanish-speaking Latin America, @mongabaylatam.bsky.social hosted Puma Fest in Bogota last week. About 400 people attended in person. news.mongabay.com/2026/07/ten-...
Ten years of Mongabay Latam
When Mongabay Latam began publishing in 2016, the decision felt like a logical next step. Mongabay Indonesia, launched four years earlier, had shown that a locally led, local-language newsroom could b...
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The Trump administration's decision to remove habitat destruction from the regulatory definition of “harm” under the Endangered Species Act weakens America's standing when it asks other countries to conserve forests, wetlands, rivers, and other important habitats. news.mongabay.com/2026/07/amer...
America’s retreat from wildlife protection will be felt far beyond its borders
For more than half a century, the United States treated the protection of habitat as part of protecting endangered wildlife. The Endangered Species Act prohibited killing protected wildlife, and the g...
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Miriam Horn’s Homesick for a World Unknown portrays a scientist defined by patience, close observation, and a disciplined effort to understand animals on their own terms, even as such an approach ran against prevailing scientific norms. news.mongabay.com/2026/04/geor...
George Schaller: The field biologist who helped redefine conservation
Some lives seem to belong less to a nation or a profession than to a disposition. George B. Schaller’s was one of them. He belonged, above all, to animals—gorillas, lions, tigers, snow leopards, panda...
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The emotional price of conservation work news.mongabay.com/2026/03/the-...
A profession built on hope, strained by loss
Earlier this month, Jeremy Hance’s “‘An epidemic of suffering’: Why are conservationists breaking down?” and the follow-up commentary “Emotional and psychological stresses beleaguer conservation profe...
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Singapore has lost most of its primary forest since the 19th century, and roughly a third of terrestrial vertebrate species have disappeared locally. But there are new efforts to rewild the city state. news.mongabay.com/2026/03/can-...
Can Singapore rewild its lost reptiles?
In the older quarters of Singapore, fragments of forest persist like memories that refuse to fade. Within them live creatures that few residents ever see, and some that no longer exist there at all. T...
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Conservation has progressively moved from broad prescriptions toward more context-specific strategies, aided by advances in data and analytics. Last year, researchers proposed a label, "precision ecology", for this trend. news.mongabay.com/2026/03/wher...
Precision conservation: the rise of place-specific strategies where protection works best
Conservation has long wrestled with a deceptively simple question: not whether to act, but where action will matter most. Forest restoration, protected areas, wildlife corridors, and enforcement patro...
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In much of the world, the longest continuous records of environmental change reside not in databases but in memory, language, and daily practice. news.mongabay.com/2026/03/bird...
Birds are changing — and Indigenous memory is the longest record we have
Conservation has long depended on measurement. Populations are counted, habitats mapped, trends plotted against baselines that often extend back only a few decades. Yet many ecosystems began changing ...
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A frog’s survival can turn on whether someone remembered to culture flies. In Andasibe, for years, someone did. www.butlernature.com/2026/03/01/j...
Justin Claude Rakotoarisoa, steward of a fragile chorus
In Madagascar, frogs are not background noise but a measure of how much forest still functions. The island holds an extraordinary share of the world’s amphibian diversity, almost all of it found nowhe...
butlernature.com
Much of what determines the ocean’s condition is decided in cities, where ports control entry, authorities regulate ship operations, & buyers shape demand. So while they receive less attention than national policy or treaties, cities are leverage points. news.mongabay.com/2026/03/the-...
The power of cities over the seas
Debates about ocean protection tend to orbit national governments and multilateral treaties. Fisheries quotas, shipping rules, and marine reserves are usually negotiated by states. Yet much of the act...
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Democracies depend on oversight. They also depend on dissent. When scrutiny begins to target the act of advocacy itself, the line between accountability and deterrence becomes perilously thin. www.butlernature.com/2026/02/27/s...
Scrutiny or deterrence? Congress probes environmental advocacy
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 ...
butlernature.com
Six young journalists, scattered across three continents and connected largely by screens, recently attempted an unusual exercise: writing letters addressed to the future instead of to editors. news.mongabay.com/short-articl...
Letters to the future from journalism’s next generation
Six young journalists, scattered across three continents and connected largely by screens, recently attempted an unusual exercise: writing letters addressed to the future instead of to editors. All si...
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Biodiversity loss continues at a pace that leaves little room for ineffective interventions. The task ahead for the sector is not only to conserve nature, but to learn systematically how conservation succeeds. news.mongabay.com/2026/02/meas...
Measuring what works in conservation
Conservation has never lacked ideas. Protected areas, payments for ecosystem services, community management, certification schemes, and public campaigns have all been promoted as solutions to biodiver...
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As native forest logging ends in parts of Australia, governments and industry are turning to large-scale forest thinning as a tool to reduce bushfire risk, prompting a new debate over how best to protect communities in a warming climate. news.mongabay.com/2026/02/afte...
After logging bans, Australia turns to “forest thinning”. Does it reduce fire risk?
In the aftermath of Australia’s “Black Summer” bushfires of 2019–20, few policy questions have proved as persistent as how, exactly, to live with fire on a warming continent. Governments promise resil...
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José Albino Cañas Ramírez was a cabildante—a member of the governing council—of an Emberá Chamí territory of more than 23,000 people spread across dozens of communities. His death, leaders said, struck at the very structure of Indigenous self-government. news.mongabay.com/2026/02/jose...
José Albino Cañas Ramírez, a defender of Indigenous territories, aged 44
José Albino Cañas Ramírez did not die in a war zone, though war had shaped the landscape where he lived. He was shot at his home in the community of Portachuelo, in Colombia’s Caldas department, on th...
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A global comparison of ten satellite-based forest datasets found striking disagreement about where forests are located, with only about a quarter of mapped forest area recognized by all sources. The inconsistencies are greatest in dry forests & mosaic landscapes. news.mongabay.com/2026/02/scie...
Scientists can’t agree on where the world’s forests are
A deceptively simple question underlies many global environmental policies: where, exactly, are the world’s forests? A new study suggests the answer depends heavily on which map one consults—and that ...
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The Amazon generates 20 billion of dollars’ worth of rainfall each year, study finds. news.mongabay.com/2026/02/the-...
The Amazon’s most valuable export isn’t timber — it’s rain
Rainfall is often treated as a gift of geography — a function of latitude, oceans, and atmospheric circulation. A growing body of research suggests that in the tropics, it is also a product of ecosyst...
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The 2014–2017 Global Coral Bleaching Event was the most severe on record, affecting more than half of the world’s reefs, and a new global bleaching event that began in 2023 suggests that large-scale damage is continuing as oceans warm. news.mongabay.com/2026/02/cora...
Coral bleaching: How warming seas are transforming the world’s reefs
In ordinary circumstances coral reefs are among the most productive ecosystems on Earth, built slowly by animals that appear to be plants. Each coral polyp houses microscopic algae that convert sunlig...
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Brazil’s latest satellite alerts indicate that deforestation in the Amazon has continued to fall into early 2026, extending a downward trend that began after a sharp rise earlier in the decade. news.mongabay.com/2026/02/amaz...
Amazon deforestation on pace to be the lowest on record, says Brazil
Brazil’s latest satellite alerts indicate that deforestation in the Amazon has continued to fall into early 2026, extending a downward trend that began after a sharp rise earlier in the decade. Data r...
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Forests are not only a mitigation tool for the future climate. They also help people adapt to climate change today, shaping temperature, water and human well-being in ways that are felt locally. news.mongabay.com/2026/02/fore...
Forests don’t just store carbon. They keep people alive, scientists say
For decades, a dominant argument for protecting forests has focused on carbon. Trees absorb carbon dioxide, store it in wood and soils, and slow the accumulation of greenhouse gases. A new scientific ...
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Journalism does not enforce laws or decide outcomes. It places verified information into the public record, where others can use it over time. That slow, unattributed work is a form of civic infrastructure—easy to overlook, hard to replace. www.butlernature.com/2026/02/06/h...
How information enables action
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 indiv...
butlernature.com
For most of the 20th century, the fate of whales was treated as an industrial question. How many could be taken, how fast, and by whom. Against that background, the global moratorium on commercial whaling stands out as an improbable decision. substack.com/@rhettayersb...
Rhett Ayers Butler (@rhettayersbutler)
An unlikely truce with the great whales, 40 years on For most of the 20th century, the fate of whales was treated as an industrial question. How many could be taken, how fast, and by whom. Biology en...
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For decades, Kathy Jefferson Bancroft challenged the idea that Owens Lake was merely a technical problem, insisting it be understood as a living place with history, meaning, and obligations. news.mongabay.com/2026/02/kath...
Kathy Jefferson Bancroft, guardian of a stolen lake
In California’s interior, a long, straight aqueduct carries snowmelt south to a city that grew as if water were a birthright. Along the way it passes a valley that was once defined by water and birds,...
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Mongabay grew by filling persistent information gaps around ecosystems and communities far from centers of power, treating those places as inherently consequential. Its legacy is rooted in persistence. news.mongabay.com/2026/01/on-m...
On Mongabay’s legacy
I am often asked what Mongabay’s legacy is, or what it might turn out to be. The question usually comes with an assumption that a quarter-century of publishing should yield a tidy answer. It does not....
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The Washington Post’s decision to cut a large share of its climate and environmental reporters is not just a newsroom story; it reflects a broader weakening of the institutions that sustain a shared, reliable public record on complex and contested issues. news.mongabay.com/2026/02/what...
What is lost when environmental coverage is cut
Word that the Washington Post would be cutting roughly one-third of its staff spread quickly this week. Among those affected were at least a dozen reporters, editors, and visual journalists covering c...
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Beyond the doom loop: the case for informed optimism Conservation does not suffer from a lack of passion or intelligence. It suffers from fatigue, fragmentation, and an erosion of trust. www.butlernature.com/2026/01/16/b...
Beyond the doom loop: the case for informed optimism
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...
butlernature.com
Who gets to decide what counts as science? An Asháninka researcher from Peru is bringing community knowledge into peer-reviewed journals, reports Xilena Pinedo. Richar Demetrio’s work shows how Indigenous knowledge, long sidelined, can shape conservation and livelihoods. mongabay.cc/5A2reE
Who gets to decide what counts as science
For most of Peru’s scientific history, Indigenous knowledge has existed outside the formal record. It shaped how forests were used, how species were managed, and how risk was understood, but rarely ap...
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What Craig’s long life reveals about elephant conservation That Craig died of natural causes is not a small detail. It is, by modern standards, an achievement. Elephants with tusks like his have been selected against by poachers for half a century. news.mongabay.com/2026/01/what...
