A Review of How to Save the Amazon: A Journalist’s Fatal Quest for Answers 

How to Save the Amazon: A Journalist’s Fatal Quest for Answers by Dom Phillips with contributors (White River Junction, Vermont; London, UK: Chelsea Green, 2025)

Dom Phillips wanted to listen to the voices of those fighting to protect the Amazon rainforest and to give them visibility and a larger audience. He wanted to listen to those on the ground in the Amazon, as well as researchers, academics, farmers and government servants.

Dom wanted to put forward a book that would further mobilize people: it is possible to save the Amazon, and those on the ground are doing it. He didn’t know how to save the Amazon, nor was he willing to be the one with the answer. In a very humble way, he proposes to ask many people, from scientists to Indigenous leaders, traditional communities to agents of the Brazilian state. He went to the places of resistance in different locations of society. He had proposed to come to listen to them all, and to share his talent. This humility was one of Dom Phillips’ characteristics.

Humility, charisma and friendliness allowed him to move around in different circles and levels of a racist and classist society like Brazil. He had always had a deep human commitment throughout his work as a foreign correspondent from the United Kingdom in Brazil. He was very much aware of the UK’s history of colonialism and felt it was time to learn from non-Eurocentric views to change society to coexist with the forest. “People need to learn from Indigenous peoples that only collective, community thinking, not individual greed, can save the Amazon” (p. 19).

The book collects some of Dom’s different visions—more than anything, an extraordinary dedication to Indigenous life and wisdom:

“Where I floundered, slipped and tumbled, the Indigenous peoples walked confidently. They were the ninja warriors of this forest.”

“And they knew all the forest’s secrets. Where we saw mud and trees, they found nuts and fruits like cacao.”

“Nature is not a postcard to be gazed upon. It is a farm and a larder.”

The Indigenous people from the Amazon know the forests as city people know streets, Dom compared. Dom was from the city, an urban European white male, amazed by the knowledge and experience of the ones from the forest.

“As I got to know Dom, I realized he was different. Humble, honest.” (p. 254), says the Indigenous leader Beto Marubo, in a foreword co-written with journalist Helena Palmquist. “Dom wanted to do more than just write a story. He wanted to help. To truly help.” (p 263)

Dom’s partner, Bruno Pereira, who turned 41 the day of his murder, is described by Dom as someone he deeply trusted and admired. On page 3, Pereira is presented with Dom’s eloquent elegance as the “burly, bearded and bespectacled Pereira, a serious and committed public servant.”

As Dom started to visit the Amazon, he was mostly covering its destruction. He says, “I was thinking about how it was being destroyed.”(p. 2)

As I write this review, I look at the beautiful Bay of All Saints near Salvador, Brazil. Dom and I used to paddle there. During these moments of leisure during the pandemic, we talked and talked. He spoke about the book, about his intentions. He wanted to hear from as many people as possible who were dedicated to the fight to defend the Amazon—I was one of his many sources.

Dom’s beautifully written book introduction is precisely about the Javary valley and the expedition Dom followed for the first time.  I could see how he was transforming his written style from a more hard-news piece of journalism to a literary book.

One passage particularly strikes me, when he describes the conflict between the Matis and the Korubo—associated with territorial dispute after the violence produced by the Brazilian state dating back to the dictatorship. That was my argument, at least: the conflict was only between the two Indigenous nations, the conflict was waged in Indigenous territories, but produced by the colonial intervention of the Brazilian state.

Dom wrote in The Guardian in 2018, “The first isolated Korubo group was contacted in 1996. They killed a Funai employee a year later. Another isolated group killed two men from the Matis tribe in a land dispute in 2014. The Matis counter-attacked with shotguns, leaving nine Korubo dead and capturing dozens more. Funai stepped in and negotiated a tense contact process with no casualties.”

I remember this part stood out from the body of a very beautiful article because it contained some passages written with a certain prejudice not encountered in his book. He had time to rethink and be more careful with his words, presenting a more personal account than that edited by rushed news agency editors. Instead of criminalizing the Matis, “counter-attacked with shotguns,” but acknowledging that the front the standpoint ot the Matis, Funai has had a part in producing this conflict. When I pointed that out to Dom, he replied to me in a very polite way. I reviewed the words of my criticism, and I understood his points, as he told me that this was the information he had. We became friends, and he taught me how to have a high-level debate with elegance and respect.

In the book, on page 4, Dom had the chance to review and improve this part of the expedition he followed Bruno: “The first group of Korubo was contacted in 1996. These people were believed to have killed a FUNAI employee a year later. A second group became embroiled in a bloody contact with the Matis, another valley people, in 2014 that left dead on both sides before Pereira and FUNAI stepped in to negotiate a fraught contract.”

After the disaster produced by Funai’s misconduct in 2014, it was precisely what happened when Bruno led a last expedition in 2019, in Jair Bolsonaro’s first year in office, which was extremely important to bring peace to the territory. I would love to have had the chance to congratulate Dom.

The decision Pereira took in March 2019, amidst a frightening beginning to the Bolsonaro administration, was surprising and risky, given the unfavorable political climate for any action supporting Indigenous rights. But the very decision of whether or not to establish contact was marked by the presence of death: not making contact could expose the entire collective to death; making contact could save lives, or conversely, cause deaths due to the risks involved. Pereira declared in an interview that the situation was extreme, “which puts the physical survival of the isolated group (Korubo) at risk, as well as the physical integrity of the Matis” (Milanez 2018)

So, during the years working deeper and deeper in the Amazon, Dom had been reviewing and improving, listening, learning and reading. Dom’s writing in his book appears now more on his own—more precise, more beautiful than the edited journalistic article. More accurate and sophisticated. More personal, more of a new Dom-professional style he was inaugurating.

The book has a collective foreword by the organizers who did not let the book be buried with Dom: Rebecca Carter, David Davies, Andrew Fishman, Tom Henningan and John Watts explain the methods and the limits, and the collective effort on behalf of Dom’s memory.

The first chapter, entirely written by Dom about the Javari, describes the turbulent times during Michel Temer’s unstable government, when violence increased in the Amazon, to Bolsonaro’s election with its escalating state violence. “Loggers, garimpeiros—as the gold miners are called—and land grabbers felt emboldened by Bolsonaro’s rhetoric,” writes Dom (p. 9-10). Precisely, in a very dark way, that is exactly what happened, what led to Bruno and Dom’s killing.

Dom evokes this memory of violence with his characteristically precise description. “If the seeds for this book were planted on my trip to Javari in 2018, they took firm root after Bolsonaro’s win, when I visited the dusty settlers’ town of Novo Progresso on the other side of the Amazon in the state of Pará – a town where Jair Bolsonaro got 78 per cent of the vote.”(p. 110) He tells the terrible story of the day farmers decided to set fire in the forest to produce a massive forest fire to clean land from the forest to open for land grabs: the Fire Day.” He describes how he went there with Daniel Camargos, from Reporter Brasil, and João Laet, a photographer. This powerful trip made Dom and Daniel close friends, resulting in a beautiful film homage, “Reports of a War Correspondent in the Amazon.”

Listening to all sides in conflicts, Dom sought to move beyond two-sidedness, without denying class and racial conflicts and broad social struggles that lead to the brutal violence against the Amazon and the traditional communities living with the forest. The “land mess,” he writes, to describe Amazon’s land ownership: “The Amazon has a murky history of property ownership, in which land titles were often fraudulent and notaries paid off to register them, or they were falsified, or referred to land somewhere else—so-called ‘flying titles’—or they delineated more land than the owner had actually bought or been given.” (p. 71)

Racism and violence were used to set up this mess to favor a few, thus creating immense landholdings, the latifúndios. “White immigrants were given more chances”,  he points out sharply. (p. 66)  He showed the contradictions on all sides, much more than binary opposition, but always made it very clear the injustice of the historical process derived from colonialism. He made an enormous effort to listen to what each person has to say to save the Amazon, their dreams and desires and their practices, but also to reveal their interests.

As an example, Dom unsuccessfully tried to interview Paulo Parazzi, an environmental agency official from Paraná in southern Brazil, about the ownership of a farm illegally placed inside an Indigenous reserve. He was rebuffed even when he contacted Parazzi at work.

A cattle rancher he interviewed is presented through his ideological commitment to capitalism: “money above all” and “making money.” Dom politely disagrees: “He hadn’t priced climate change into his business plan. By the time he does, it may be to late.” (p. 82).

The research followed a methodology very focused on Dom’s sensibility and in the field—this was his greatest strength. Within the so-called “scientific field,” he sometimes confuses NGOs or think tanks with academic research, and concepts are generally presented from a perspective of the hegemony of scientific knowledge. But even with this, Dom was already absorbing the contradictions and disputes in this field, especially regarding the movement of decolonization of knowledge.

We know, and Dom knew very well, that all solutions within capitalism are limited. The transition to the end of deforestation runs up against the ideology of good business. Something bigger is needed: an eco-social transformation, broader than society and the civilizational model of modernity, is necessary. And Dom continued to meet with the Indigenous peoples—and the peoples of the forest, such as riverine communities and rubber tappers, who have learned from the forest and the Indigenous peoples.

One of his last trips before going to the Javari was to visit the Ashaninka Indigenous peoples. Part of this experience was saved, so we can hear shaman and leader Benki Ashaninka tell him: “We have to think of a different model,’ he said. ‘Everything is connected. Nothing is disconnected in this universe.”( 213)

The fascination with Indigenous knowledge was embedded in a commitment to defend their rights and to expose the violence against them. What happened to the Korubo, in general, to the Indigenous, is what happened to him and Bruno: attacks by gangs of fishermen and drug traffickers. “They told us that four fishermen from one of the fishing gangs had fired over the heads of a group of children that morning. Invasions from fishing gangs were on the rise and they were deeply concerned.” (p. 4)

Dom’s anxiety to ”save the Amazon” could sometimes lead him to a quick fix, an apparently simpler way out of a general awareness, but one that is known to have little real and lasting impact: consumer awareness. Capitalism will not save the Amazon, and consumption awareness is something incompatible with the system that produces desires for accumulation. Dom invites his readers: “I also want to show readers what they can do: how the rising pressure that investors are putting on Brazil is making a difference, as is consumer anger over the way deforestation is caused by meat multinationals’ willingness to buy from Amazon cattle farmers who have committed environmental crimes. Consumers and companies can force change when they vote with their wallets.” (p. 18)

As he further elaborates on this position later in his text, dedicated to Indigenous livelihood, “only collective, community thinking, not individual greed, can save the Amazon.”

Journalists Eliane Brum, Tom Phillips, Stuart Grundings, Andrew Fishman, Jon Lee Anderson and John Watts took what Dom had written and entered into a dialogue with Dom’s notes, trying to present what Dom was researching. They do not share the sensibility of Dom’s description, and how Dom learned to invite the readers to see the scenes as he did. Nobody could. Dom has reached a level of dedication and commitment rarely seen.

Sometimes, the other journalists present different political views from Dom, as to write off the coup against Dilma Rousseff, with a false impartial statement arguing that “many in the Left still believe that Rousseff ’s impeachment was the product of a coup orchestrated by Congress with the support of Rousseff ’s vice president and immediate successor, Michel Temer.” In my opinion, this is an absolutely unnecessary commentary fogging up such a beautiful book. Such as, on page 25, that technically was written by Dom Phillips, when the writing follows an interview with Lopes, from Ibama, and apparently has been edited after Dom’s death: “That almost proved to be the case in just one year after Lula returned to power.” Lula returned after Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira were killed in 2023. Usually, little edited mistakes should not bother readers focused on such an extraordinary work, but taking into account the tragedy behind this posthumous book, having a sentence like that is disturbing.

We need to thank the contributors and Alessandra Sampaio, Dom’s wisdom, for putting forward, with great commitment, this beautiful book. It’s our chance to enjoy the last enormous talent of Dom Phillips’ sensitive and humble descriptions of the Amazon, and the chance to learn through him and his admiration of indigenous people. “The Indigenous are the heroes,” as Bruno told Dom, on page 3. It’s our last chance to celebrate Dom, who remains alive throughout his immortal writing.

Felipe Milanez is a tenured Assistant Professor at the Milton Santos Institute of Humanities, Arts and Sciences, and a faculty member in the Graduate Program in Culture and Society and the Graduate Program in Economics, all at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA). He is the author of the book Lutar com a Floresta: uma ecologia política do martírio em defesa da Amazônia (Elefante 2024).

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