Rhett Butler Profile Picture

Rhett Butler

Founder, Editor-in-Chief, and CEO, Mongabay

Rhett is the Founder, Editor-in-Chief, and CEO of Mongabay, a non-profit media organization with more than three dozen staff across four bureaus (Global, Indonesia, Latin America, and India) and a network of around 500 correspondents in 70 countries who pursue stories ranging from conventional news articles to deeply-reported investigative projects. Rhett founded Mongabay in 1999 with the mission of raising interest in and appreciation of wildlands and wildlife. For the first ten years of the project, he operated Mongabay on his own, publishing thousands of stories and tens of thousands of photos. Beyond Mongabay, Rhett Butler founded WildMadagascar.org and has advised a range of organizations and institutions, from news outlets to philanthropic foundations to development agencies, and his writing and photography have appeared in hundreds of publications. Rhett was the first journalist to win the Field Museum’s Parker/Gentry Award from the Field Museum in Chicago. A special thank you to Rhett for serving on the Trees for Jane Project Allocation and oversight team.