After 25 years, mongabay’s environmental legacy lies in covering the world’s forgotten places

When asked about Mongabay’s legacy after a quarter-century of environmental journalism, founder Rhett Butler doesn’t offer a simple answer. The influential environmental news website didn’t start with grand ambitions to revolutionize media or redefine how we cover nature. Instead, it began with something much more straightforward: a fascination with tropical forests and a recognition that vast portions of the world’s environmental story were going untold.

What Mongabay accomplished over 25 years was filling a critical gap that larger news outlets increasingly abandoned. While major media organizations focused on politics, wars, and financial crises, Mongabay committed to sustained, detailed reporting on the places and ecosystems far from centers of power—tropical forests, coral reefs, small island fisheries, Indigenous territories, and remote mining frontiers. These locations rarely make headlines, yet they often sit at the epicenter of our planet’s greatest environmental risks.

The website’s true legacy lies in its persistence. Where other news organizations cover environmental issues sporadically, Mongabay has maintained consistent focus on the margins of global attention, operating under the principle that these remote places matter in their own right. This approach requires significant time investment, local knowledge, and patience with stories that don’t always resolve neatly—qualities that have become increasingly rare in today’s fast-paced media landscape.

By championing long-form environmental journalism focused on overlooked regions, Mongabay has demonstrated that there’s both an audience and a critical need for in-depth coverage of the natural world’s most vulnerable places.