Rhett Ayers Butler (born 1978)[1] is an American journalist, author and entrepreneur who founded Mongabay, a conservation and environmental science news platform, in 1999.

[8] In 2012 Butler founded Mongabayorg Corporation, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) charitable organization headquartered in Menlo Park, California that raises awareness about social and environmental issues relating to forests and other ecosystems.

[9] Mongabay.org was established in 2012 as the non-profit arm of Mongabay[10] and its first project with Mongabay-Indonesia, an Indonesian-language environmental news service.

[12] Butler's reporting has focused on environmental issues in the tropics, especially topics related to forests, like biodiversity, conservation, and deforestation.

[21] Butler played a prominent role in the effort to free American journalist Philip Jacobson after his detention on 17 December 2019 on an alleged visa violation.