BIO
In 1999, fresh out of university, Rhett A. Butler (San Francisco, United States; 1978) founded the environmental website Mongabay with the goal of conveying the beauty of the tropical rainforest and convincing the public that it needed saving. Twenty-five years later, he has seen Mongabay grow into a leading international news site, whose articles and reports reach a vast audience of five million people a month, and have even inspired real, on-the-ground initiatives in ecosystem conservation.
Appalled by news stories about the destruction suffered by the tropical rainforest he had visited as a child, Butler began writing on the region’s environmental deterioration while studying Management Science and Economics at the University of California (United States) and created the Mongabay website as a place to share his stories. After starting his first job at a tech startup in Silicon Valley, Butler continued posting articles that he would write at night. And as the site’s revenues grew, initially from advertising, he was able to quit his job to focus exclusively on Mongabay.
Today, the website is a non-profit entity that publishes all of its content under a Creative Commons license. For Butler, the key to its success has been forging a global network of journalists reporting from Nature’s front line who relate their experiences directly in the language of the region.