Nature Solutionaries Veronika Perkova

When Rhett Butler created a website called Mongabay 25 years ago, he had no idea it would become one of the most popular webs about conservation. 



But it’s no wonder it did.



For years, Rhett Butler worked 100 hours per week. 



He wrote thousands of articles about rainforests and published tens of thousands of photos from his travels.



He lived modestly from his savings and often heard comments, like "You are crazy for not chasing money.”



But his hard effort has paid off. Nowadays, Mongabay has five offices, 90 in-house staff members and 1,000 correspondents in 80 countries.



Together with Rhett we talk about:

➡️ why he never gave up

➡️ how he avoided comparing himself with wealthier peers in Silicon Valley

➡️ how to focus on what matters and less about money, and MUCH MORE

When Reinhard Nyandire was small, he lived in a mud hut and ate one meal per day. But that never stopped him from dreaming he would one day become a wildlife conservationist. 



Ignoring the teasing from his friends, he went on to study Environmental Planning and became a successful conservationist. 



Thanks to his social media campaigns, locals began flocking into Nairobi National Park and fell in love with it. Together, they were able to stop urban developers from destroying the park.



Nowadays, he consults for international environmental organizations and continues fighting for climate justice and land restoration under the helm of Justdiggit.

When Ayesha Amin, a renowned Pakistani women’s
rights activist, first saw a condom in a workshop, she refused to touch it.



“I felt so embarrassed that I just wanted to disappear,” she says. Her shame, however, turned into curiosity and this moment helped Amin realize that talking about sex and reproduction shouldn’t be taboo.



In 2018, Amin founded the nonprofit Baithak:
Challenging Taboos, which has reached 300,000 women across Pakistan with workshops on family planning, menstrual health and gender-based violence.


Having witnessed one of the worst climate disasters in Pakistan’s history, Amin has also been a fierce advocate for climate policies that address the needs of
young girls and women.



Together we talk about


her dogged persistence to
never stop dreaming
her daring acts of resistance to patriarchal norms
dismantling harmful menstruation myths
and about why there has to be more
than just 2 women out of 50 men in climate meetings.

 

To learn more about Ayesha Amin’s work, check out Baithak’s website, Baithak’s Instagram account or Amin’s Linkedin profile.

 

TIP: Help de-stigmatize menstruation by talking
about it with your close ones.

Even though child marriage might seem like a thing of the past for some of us, one in five girls globally are still married off under the age of 18.

This means that for millions of these child brides, their childhood, education and future have been stolen forever. Uneducated women often end up having worse health and economic outcomes and their families are more vulnerable to climate change.

To free girls from this nightmarish practice, Ugandan activist Joan Kembabazi has been challenging traditional beliefs in her community and advocating for girls‘ education and empowerment.

In this interview, Joan talks about why child marriage happens, what it‘s like to be a child bride and what needs to be done to eliminate this practice.

Joan Kembabazi is the Founder & CEO of the Gufasha Girls Foundation. She campaigns against child marriage and advocates for girls‘ education in rural communities in central Uganda and beyond.

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If we truly want to liberate women, access to contraception is just the tip of the iceberg. We also need to feel comfortable talking about our bodies, our sexuality and sensuality, menstruation, post-partum depression, parental burnout and menopause. Because if we feel ashamed or embarrassed about these topics, we’re still being repressed.

That’s just one of many life lessons that Nadine Goodman has learned over the last 40 years running CASA, an impactful nonprofit that helps 80,000 people in central Mexico push reproductive health and rights forward every year. In this revealing interview, we talk about what needs to happen for women to be truly liberated and why it’s a good idea to take a holistic view of the health and well-being of women, whole communities, and the environment.

To have a large family, and at least one son, are such strong cultural and religious norms in Nigeria that when women don’t meet them they’re often considered failures. Not only is this unfair to women, it’s also becoming nearly impossible to provide for a big family in Nigeria, where poverty is rampant and the cost of living has recently tripled. 

Chidera Benoit, a teacher and Executive Director of ⁠Population Explosion Awareness Initiative⁠, explains why it’s essential to change harmful patriarchal norms, broaden access to voluntary family planning and open up a conversation about sustainable population in Nigeria whose population is expected to double in the next two decades.