How to Save the Amazon A Journalist's Deadly Quest for Answers

About this book

An urgent work of reportage which takes the reader deep inside the Amazon rainforest, and shows that even if you kill a journalist, you cannot silence a story.

On 5 June 2022, award-winning journalist Dom Phillips was working on this book, alongside the Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira, when they were both shot. They are believed to have been assassinated by one of the criminal networks whose ecological exploitation they were working to expose.

As the world becomes more aware of the significance of the Amazon, home to nearly 400 billion trees, working in this vast region has become ever more dangerous for activists and journalists. Fires, land grabs, and the invasion of reserves have all spiked over recent decades, pushing the world's biggest forest ever closer to a point of no return. The last few years have seen efforts to reduce deforestation, but the question remains; can we save this globally essential ecosystem before it is too late?

Dom's important and ultimately hopeful book argues the answer is yes. A group of expert writers took up his partially completed manuscript, committed to his mission of uncovering the truth about deforestation and searching for solutions. Blending in-depth reporting and encounters with indigenous activists, ecologists, farmers, and political figures, How to Save the Amazon is a dazzling account of how we can fight ecological destruction and stand in solidarity with the Earth's environmental defenders.

Customer Reviews

Biography

Dom Phillips was a highly experienced British freelance journalist. He moved to Brazil in 2007 and wrote extensively for British and American newspapers such as the Guardian and Washington Post. In 2023, How to Save the Amazon was awarded a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant by the Whiting Foundation. In June 2022, Dom Phillips and his colleague Bruno Pereiria were killed in a remote part of the Amazon while researching this book.