Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries.
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’ve built a network of hundreds of local reporters in 80 countries to bring those ground truths to light. But I’ve learned that ground and sky are not opposites — they’re partners. The satellite data that show deforestation spreading across a landscape become most meaningful when someone on the ground explains who is cutting, why, and what is lost. Likewise, a reporter’s field notes gain power when viewed against a global pattern visible from space. Journalism’s job is to connect those scales: to make the invisible visible, and the local legible to the world.
That balance between evidence and empathy, data and dirt under your nails, is increasingly hard to maintain. We live in an age when the tools to see the planet have never been more powerful, yet the will to believe the evidence has rarely been weaker. The same technology that lets us monitor a rainforest in real time also enables the effortless creation of a fake tiger video that millions may believe. Journalism now requires both skepticism and faith: skepticism toward every new image or claim, and faith that truth still matters enough to pursue at great cost.
If there is optimism to be found, it’s that people still care about stories grounded in reality. When a community in Gabon kept its ancestral forest because a local journalist reported their struggle, it reiterated to me that facts, when reported faithfully, can still change outcomes. Ground truth still has power — if we keep digging for it.
This reflection draws on a conversation with Alan Stoga for the Tällberg Foundation’s “New Thinking for a New World!” podcast series.
Banner image: Deforestation in Borneo, Malaysia. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.
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