How to Save The Amazon: This testimony book by the assassinated journalist Dom Phillips lays bare the tragedy of Amazônia – of which he himself came to be one of the most painful examples – but also its uniquely marvellous nature.
This review appeared in Portuguese on Amazônia Latitude. You can read the original here. It was translated for LAB by Mike Gatehouse
Dom Phillips was in the wrong place, on the wrong day, at the wrong moment. Brazil, between 2017 and 2022, was living through the apotheosis of negativity (the negation of law, of science, of policy, of the environment, of the laws of civilization and of altruistic thought). The irrational was common currency.
After living in Brazil for a decade, the British journalist had come to have a deep knowledge about Brazilians, with their paradoxes, their contradictions, their scheming, their ideological misrepresentations and yet, at the same time, their immense human, environmental and cultural riches.
It was an immersive and exhaustive training in journalism, an outdoor laboratory for the most vital and important writing and reporting of his life – despite the dark shadows that were gathering.
Learning from the clashes he witnessed in the 1990s between Jungle, Drum and Base and progressive House music in London clubs such as Ministry of Sound and The Orb, Phillips plunged into his new project: to report, from Brazil and from the Amazon. He spent days eating monkey brain and wild boar steak, crossing rivers infested with alligators, sleeping with jararaca snakes and prospecting for traces of the isolated Indigenous peoples of the Amazon.
He was trying to shrink the vast gulf between the worldview of the Indigenous people, and his own situation as a foreigner, something that would enable him to understand better things that others could only fantasize about. Speaking about his Indigenous guide, Alcino, he remarked ‘It was as though I was running blindfold through a one-dimensional forest, seen only in black and white, while he was moving in a richly coloured universe, full of a torrent of information’.
This disconcerting modesty, added to the acute perceptiveness of a born reporter and his profound knowledge of human nature, allowed Dom Phillips, in his long expected posthumous book How to Save the Amazon – a Journalist’s Deadly Quest for Answers (English edition: Ithaca Press, London, 2025), to develop an Amazonian appreciation. One that is free from the preconceptions, simplifications and the ingenuous views typical of foreigners, and avoids the self-indulgence, pretension and tropical-centredness characteristic of Brazilians.
The book was conceived as a means of completing posthumously the work of Dom Phillips and his Brazilian host Bruno Pereira. The two men, as we know, were brutally assassinated on 5 June 2022 in Vale do Javari, Amazônia, by gunmen hired by a trafficker. When they died, the book was less than half-finished – Dom had finished the first four chapters and made notes and outlines for the six remaining. The unfinished chapters were completed using articles, reports and research carried out by colleagues and friends in this field: the award-winning journalist Jon Lee Anderson, Jonathan Watts, Andrew Fishman, Stuart Grudgings, Eliane Brum, Tom Phillips and with a postscript by Helena Palmquist and Beto Marubo.
Impressive ambition
In the completed chapters that he left, we can see Dom Phillips’ impressive ambition: he wanted to give a thorough account of the environmental question in the Brazilian north, where the great rain-forest is located. These texts cover the corruption of politics, predatory cattle-ranching, illegal business deals and unregulated urbanization. But the greatest quality of a good reporter, as in Dom’s case, is to know how to listen, even when the arguments given appear to be pure prejudice. ‘Gold is a gift of God’s nature. If we need it, where do we go to? To where it is,’ was a message from a group of garimpeiros (illegal miners) who were organizing militias to fire at judges and try to shoot down IBAMA’s helicopters.
In these first chapters, Phillips used all his long experience of the political-environmental system of Brazil to situate his doubts, based on facts ranging from the accidental death of Eduardo Campos, the presidential candidate, to the environmental disasters of Brumadinho and Mariana, in Minas Gerais.
There had been his baptisms in reporting from Brazil for publications like The Guardian and The Financial Times in Britain and the Washington Post in the US. Passing through areas of devastation by fire, such as São Félix do Xingo – where it’s common for armed thugs to seize land at gun-point by telling the farmers ‘Either you sell it to me, or your widow will.’ – Phillips listened to everyone from the largest plantation owners to the migrants abandoning their land in search of work. In addition he undertook exhaustive research into statistical data (‘Today 16 per cent of the Brazilian Amazon is occupied by cattle farms, and 42 per cent of the country’s livestock is pastured in the Amazonian states’).
These qualities make Dom Phillips’ book an invaluable aide to understanding the dimensions of the national tragedy.
A river of ideas
In the chapters which he left unfinished, like a river that is fed by multiple springs, there were notes dotted with ideas, small hypotheses, leading the reporter towards possible lines of investigation. For example, one experience among the Awá people: anointing one’s head with a foam made from cupims (termites), in an Indigenous rite, helps to sharpen the senses for hunting. This led Phillips to realize that knowledge of rainforest pharmaceuticals was still in its infancy. This substance applied to his skin gave Dom an enormous boost to his perceptions, and yet there was absolutely no mention of it in any of the literature.
The Journalists who undertook to complete Dom Phillips’ book didn’t restrict themselves to writing articles to complement the rest. They made every effort to follow his train of thought, taking it up from where he had left off (like a typical old-school journalist, he wrote all his notes by hand). Jon Lee came to Acre, accompanied by his son Maximo. Stuart Grudgings, who lives in Costa Rica, took on the chapter which deals with that country. Eliane Brum already lives in the middle of Amazônia. The Global Environment Editor of The Guardian, Jonathan Watts, had gone to live in the rainforest to do his work. Andrew Fishman, who wrote about the international interests involved, comes from The Intercept in Brazil.
Driven by an instinct to map the genealogy of these problems, Dom Phillips’ text rescues facts that the environmental narratives of Brazil usually ignore, numbed to a brutality which has become commonplace. ‘At times, to give poisoned food as a gift was just one of the many methods of killing Indigenous communities,’ he recalls.
Sometimes he reaches conclusions which might appear to us obvious, but they are not. ‘People who get rich by exploring and destroying the Amazon have one thing in common: they hardly ever come from the region’s Indigenous communities.’
Ever careful, Phillips protects his sources whenever this is necessary: ‘I don’t mention names, to avoid retaliation against my sources,’ he says, and like any good journalist he will sometimes play devil’s advocate in interviews.
Of course, he differentiates the environmental policies of progressive governments from those of governments of the extreme right. But he doesn’t let the left off the hook. He highlights the developmentalist thinking of former president Dilma Rousseff and her responsibility for the construction of the Belo Monte dam and the impact this has had on the zero deforestation policies of PT governments.
There are some issues that Dom Phillips scarcely touches on. He didn’t, for example, go in any depth into the relationship between the culture of sertaneja (in effect, Brazil’s local equivalent of country and western) music with its millionaire stars, and what he calls ‘cultura caubói’ – cowboy culture. But he does incidentally identify en passant this symbiosis and the ambition to make this the dominant trend in sertaneja culture. He uses the theory of the anthropologist Jeffrey Hoelle to demonstrate how sertaneja music serves the dominant status quo. ‘It offers,’ Hoelle writes, ‘a voice of opposition to environmental conservation, seeing such efforts as an afront to the self-sufficiency which is a vital source of identity for many rural producers, especially those migrants who came to Amazônia to build their future’.
The disastrous record of the Bolsonaro government in relation to Amazônia is dissected in detail by Dom Phillips from his unique vantage point. He chronicles the crafty persecution of all the inspectors and defenders of the rainforest. He locates the starting-point of this siege with the forgotten case of the fine levied by an Ibama inspector, Paulo Morelli, on a man who was fishing in a restricted area in 2012, in Angra dos Reis. The man who was fishing was an associate of a minor figure with a reputation for violence called Jair Bolsonaro. Fined for illegal fishing, Bolsonaro went on the warpath against the inspector (and, by extension, against environmentalism per se), until he succeeded later, after being elected president, in getting Morelli transferred to maintenance of environmental inspection flights.
This posthumous book by Dom Phillips is a rare achievement. Here is a writer with a refined precision in the written word, and a refined background as a chronicler. ‘Irreverent and laconic, aged 50 something, with an awkward and acid sense of humour, and the hoarse voice of a smoker’ is one description of the author. It is a rare book because it pores over the question of Brazil’s environment with the eyes of a new convert, a stranger who tries to understand and decipher the myriad of existing conflicts from the very beginning, with an understanding absolutely uncontaminated… but which is not satisfied with the commonplace answers. It is precisely this displacement between what formed Dom Phillips, his cultural baggage, open to the world, and that which he managed to understand in the country he adopted as his home, that Amazon, that beautiful Amazon, which has made his book a wonderful legacy.
How to Save the Amazon – a Journalist’s Deadly Quest for Answers is published by Ithaca Press, London, 2025.
The Amazon in Times of War, by Marcos Colón, was published by LAB and Practical Action Publishing in October 2024.
Main image: The authors of How to Save the Amazon. Photos: Reprodução Twitter/@domphillips; Reprodução LinkedIn/Tom Phillips; Julián Roldán/FNPI; Fronteiras do Pensamento/Wikimedia Commons; Canon Gate (via); Rômulo Serpa/Agência CNJ; Capa: Alceu Chiesorin Nunes/Companhia das Letras.
Jotabê Medeiros is a writer and reporter. He has worked as a journalist on Folha de S.Paulo, O Estado de S.Paulo, Veja SP and CartaCapital. He has contributed to various anthologies and his published books include Raul Seixas – Não diga que a canção está perdida (2019), finalist for the Prêmio Jabuti.
