Rhett A. Butler, Mongabay founder and CEO, has been named to the 2025 Forbes Sustainability Leaders List, which honors 50 global leaders working to combat the climate crisis.
“Mongabay has tended to fly under the radar. We’ve focused on the journalism rather than promoting ourselves, so this recognition is especially meaningful — and it reflects the contributions of everyone involved,” Bulter said.
The recognition is a milestone in a journey that goes back some 25 years to when Butler was a teenager visiting a rainforest in Borneo.
“I vividly remember cooling my feet beside a jungle creek when a wild orangutan emerged in the canopy overhead. We made eye contact — just for a few seconds — but the moment stayed with me,” he told Forbes.
He later learned that the forest where he had that profound experience was to be destroyed for pulp and paper. That devastating news sparked in him a lifelong commitment to conservation; he eventually quit his tech job in Silicon Valley and started Mongabay out of his California apartment.
“My parents weren’t thrilled about the idea,” he recalled. “I was often asked when I’d get a ‘real job.’ It took several years — and external recognition — for them to see that Mongabay could be a ‘real job.’”
Today, Mongabay is a global newsroom with roughly 1,000 contributors across more than 80 countries, producing podcasts, videos and articles in seven languages from bureaus in Latin America, India, Africa and Brazil. Hundreds of local media outlets republish Mongabay content, worldwide.
All that work, expansion and outreach are in service of the same goal: “to ensure that credible environmental information is available to everyone — especially those with the power to act,” Butler told Forbes.
Unlike many media outlets, Mongabay doesn’t measure success in clicks or pageviews. Instead, it focuses on “meaningful, real-world outcomes,” Butler added.
To that end, the organization engages directly with policymakers and local communities most affected by environmental degradation. Mongabay’s planned story transformer initiative, for example, will use AI with human editors to repackage original reporting into audio and local languages for frontline communities that may struggle with barriers in language or literacy.
Mongabay’s direct engagement has made tangible impacts on the ground. In Gabon, coverage of a community’s fight against a foreign logging company helped lead to the revocation of the company’s permit, a first in Gabon.
Reporting from Paraguay linked illegal deforestation to cattle and leather, helping push the EU to include leather in its anti-deforestation law.
In Peru, Mongabay’s reporting on United Cacao practices contributed to the government revoking its permit, the company’s delisting from the London Stock Exchange and the protection of nearly 100,000 hectares (247,000 acres) of rainforest.
“These aren’t abstract wins — they’re forests still standing, communities empowered and ecosystems given a second chance. Bearing witness to both the threats and the possibilities reminds me daily that telling these stories matters,” Butler said.
Banner image: Rhett Butler in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay
This story first appeared on Mongabay
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and Mongabay, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.