Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. When I think about what makes someone care about the natural world, it rarely begins with statistics or graphs. It begins with a moment. For me, it was an encounter I had at age 12 with frogs in an Indigenous community in the Ecuadorian Amazon, a fascination that turned to urgency when I later read about an oil spill near where I had stayed. Since then, I’ve come to believe that connection, not just information, is what stirs people to act. During a recent conversation with Jessica Morgenthal for her Resilience Gone Wild podcast, we spoke about that idea: how empathy for one being can lead to concern for an entire ecosystem. When people talk about “a herd of g

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