Rhett Ayers Butler

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...

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-...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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-...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

The figures in my piece refer to the Brazilian Amazon, not Brazil as a whole.

Cattle are well under $20B/year.

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...

The Amazon generates 20 billion of dollars’ worth of rainfall each year, study finds.

news.mongabay.com/2026/02/the-...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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

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...

The conservation ledger: What we lost and what we gained in 2025 Extinction is rarely a moment. It is a process that unfolds offstage, marked by missed sightings, thinning records, and the slow reassignment of hope to footnotes. Discovery, too, is rarely a moment. ...

What we lost and what we gained in 2025

2025 was a year shaped by both loss and persistence, marked by species formally declared extinct, hundreds of organisms newly described, and uneven conservation outcomes across forests, reefs, and the open ocean.

news.mongabay.com/2026/01/the-...

Declared extinct in 2025: A look back at some of the species we lost Some species officially bid us farewell this year. They may have long been gone, but following more recent assessments, they’re now formally categorized as extinct on the IUCN Red List, considered the...

And a longer piece by Shreya Dasupta: news.mongabay.com/short-articl...

Species confirmed extinct in 2025 Extinction is rarely a moment. It is a process that unfolds offstage, marked by missed sightings, thinning records, and the slow reassignment of hope to footnotes. This year, a small group of species ...

A short piece: www.butlernature.com/2025/12/28/s...

Species confirmed extinct in 2025

Extinction is a process that unfolds offstage, marked by missed sightings, thinning records, and the slow reassignment of hope to footnotes. This year, a small group of species crossed a final bureaucratic threshold & were formally listed as extinct by IUCN.

70 environmental defenders & conservationists who died in 2025

Environmental progress often depends on endurance, sustained over years, by people whose work mattered long before their names did.

news.mongabay.com/2025/12/envi...