HeyJaredNature briefs by Rhett Ayers Butler
I'm the founder and CEO of Mongabay, a non-profit that covers issues at the intersection of people and nature via a global network of local reporters. I also write and take pictures.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 6
- Latest publication
- Sep 29, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Aug 25, 2026
Latest issues
Conservation is not a software problem (opens the original)
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New York Climate Week was as busy as ever with more than 30 events and meetings over four-and-a-half days in the city. I did several talks. Here’s a recap of a few of them.<img alt="" class="sizing-normal" height="1092" src="https://substackcdn.com/i
What AI is doing to our web traffic (opens the original)
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Last year I wrote a piece about how generative AI seemed to be affecting traffic to Mongabay’s news sites. I think it would be useful to provide an update, especially in light of recently unsealed court documents showing that employees at Microsoft and OpenAI had raised concerns that LLMs could eviscerate publishers by reducing traffic and revenue. One Microsoft executive described the use of online content to train AI as potentially the “largest theft of labor in human history.”In my piece, I n
A clownfish’s last stand (opens the original)
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Twenty years ago, scientist and Mongabay board member Debby Ng joined a team documenting life at Terumbu Bayan, a coral reef south of Singapore that was about to be reclaimed.There she encountered a pair of false clownfish living in an anemone.The mother was unusually aggressive, even for a species known to be feisty. She repeatedly charged Debby, a diver thousands of times her size, biting her several times. Then Debby saw what she was protecting: a brood of eggs. She could already see tiny eye
During COVID-19, some Borneo villages lost far less forest than others. (opens the original)
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<img alt="" class="sizing-normal" height="1092" src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!P3hD!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fac0a04bc-9d7f-4a5e-a1ec-d51145dfc6d3_1920x1440.
For 50 years, Philip Fearnside has calculated the costs of losing the Amazon (opens the original)
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Clarification: Last week, I mentioned closing down my “Nature Obituaries” Substack newsletter. That news prompted some disappointed reactions from readers, so I’d like to clarify that I still plan to write these pieces periodically for my blog, Mongabay, and LinkedIn.I’m discontinuing only the dedicated Substack newsletter, where relatively few people see these pieces. For context, on average, one of these obituaries reaches more than 100 times as many people on LinkedIn and attracts 250 times a
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