The Environment

A personal encounter with deforestation years ago — when a Malaysian rainforest was razed and ground into wood chips to serve a local paper plant — turned mathematician-economist Rhett A. Butler into one of the Web's foremost champions of rainforests and biodiversity. Butler embarked on a four-year research and writing project that he published online so people could it read it for free. It became the seed for Mongabay. Named for a small island off Madagascar, Mongabay delivers news, commentary, and — hey, kids! — educational material about the world's biological treasures, from the Congo to the Pacific Rim to the Amazon. Worlds are colliding: a recent story on Mongabay about financial investments in ecosystems that soak up carbon also appeared in the Wall Street Journal.

Sample Mongabay post: [T]he Chinese view the environment as higher than corruption, social security, housing prices, and the cost of education. In comparison with a recent American poll, the Chinese are more than twice as likely to rank the environment as their largest issue.