- How to save the Amazon: A journalist’s fatal quest for answers, a posthumous book by British journalist Dom Phillips with contributors, is being launched in the United Kingdom, the United States and Brazil, accompanied by dedicated events in the three countries.
- On June 5, 2022, Phillips and Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira were brutally killed in the Javari Valley region, in the Brazilian Amazon; Phillips was investigating illegal fishing in the region for his book.
- Right after the tragedy, Jonathan Watts, fellow British journalist based in Brazil and a close friend of Phillips’, led a group of expert writers to finish Phillips’ book; hundreds of people collaborated from writing, editing and translating the chapters to donating money to finish the book.
- “For me, it’s all about collaboration and solidarity. That’s really what this is: a gesture of,” Watts says.
“The journalist should not be part of the story.” Jonathan Watts, British journalist based in Brazil, recalls the words of fellow British journalist Dom Phillips and the challenges they posed to finish his posthumous book. “Dom was not the kind of journalist who wanted to be in the story. He told me, ‘I don’t like this journalism where I did this and I did that.’”
On June 5, 2022, Phillips and Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira were brutally killed in the Javari Valley region, in the Brazilian Amazon; Phillips was investigating illegal fishing in the region for his book.
How to save the Amazon: A journalist’s fatal quest for answers, by Phillips with contributors, is being launched in the United Kingdom, the United States and Brazil, accompanied by dedicated events in the three countries. Watts, The Guardian’s global environment editor and a close friend of Phillips’, led a group of expert writers to finish Phillips’ book.
“The really big challenge was how do we balance Dom’s original intentions with the reality that the world has changed and that the story has changed partly because Bruno and Dom were murdered changed the story, they became part of the story,” Watts, who wrote a chapter for Philips’ book, tells Mongabay in a video interview. “In this case, the story was so big, what happened to them, that we could not not write about it.”
Despite Phillips’ “in some ways old fashioned or old school” way of thinking about never including the journalist in the story, Watts says, he wrote an earlier book about superstar DJs in which he adopted the first person style; he also wrote blog posts for Brazil’s Folha de S.Paulo newspaper in first person. “Maybe he would have been even more flexible than we discussed.”
Another big change to the book, Watts says, is the election of President Luís Inácio Lula da Silva in the same year that Phillips and Pereira died. “This clearly was something that we needed to incorporate into the book because when Dom planned his book, it was in a different context. And I’m sure, he’s a good journalist, he would have adapted his original plan to take account of the changed circumstances.”
However, these changes were accompanied by “agonized debates,” Watts says. “Can we change the original plan of Dom? Because it’s the original plan of Dom. But he would have changed it because the situation’s different, there’s a new president, so we all kind of knew it would have to change.”
But the group was “wrestling with this ideal,” Watts notes. “Our primary motive was to get close to Dom’s original plans. And then the need to be realistic and to apply journalistic rigor and good sense to the plan, which I hope we did when we tried to incorporate changes like the change of power.”
For Andrew Fishman, a close friend of Phillips’ who also authored a chapter, finishing the book “was the hardest thing emotionally I’ve ever worked on.”
He says Phillips did almost all of the reporting and left a description of the chapters — a paragraph or two or a couple sentences — and “hieroglyphics scribbled in his notebooks.” For some chapters, he says, it was rather clear how to edit them and at what level. The unfinished chapters, however, were a big challenge, he says. “What do you do? Are we trying to conjure his spirit and write the book that he had written? Well, that’s impossible.”
As everyone involved really wanted to make sure the final book was something that Phillips would be proud of, he says, there were uncountable discussions that went on, back and forth, for a really long time.
“Do you do every single chapter the way that he would have done it, the way that he outlined, knowing that no writer’s outline and the final version of the chapter looks the same?” he questions. “For me it was excruciating. It was excruciating trying to figure out how to answer these unanswerable questions and, at some point, you just have to start moving and move forward, and that’s what happened.”
For him, it ended up being “a huge labor of love” and a gratifying experience. “And hopefully we did well enough to try to do what he would have wanted,” Fishman, president and co-founder at The Intercept Brasil, tells Mongabay in a joint video interview with Watts. “I really hope that people read it, love it and feel inspired by it.”
Watts also highlights the emotional challenges that everyone involved in finishing the book faced. “It’s the culmination of a piece of work that led to the death of our friend,” he says. “It’s a joyous occasion to launch a book. But in this case, it’s tinged with sadness and horror.” However, he says he hopes it’ll be “more joyous than anything” because this book meant a lot to Phillips, who took a big risk as a freelancer to take a year off from work to write it.
Dom hoped his book would change his life and change his career. ‘And unfortunately it did’
The Amazon Rainforest is what inspired Phillips the most, Fishman says, driving him to write a book on how to save the Amazon, highlighting the traditional communities that fight to keep a standing forest and urging us to learn from them.
“Dom did this book because he wanted to; he hoped that it would change his life and change his career. And unfortunately, it did,” Fishman says.
That’s why Phillips’ dreamed book project could not be interrupted because he and Pereira were “cowardly killed,” Fishman says. “I think everyone who knew him just immediately decided simultaneously that it is not possible, that’s not going to happen.” After the tragedy, he adds, Phillips’ friends decided they would be together to finish his book, which was supported from the very beginning by Phillips’ widow, Alessandra Sampaio, who was “absolutely adamant” that this needed to happen.
The conversations to finish Phillips’ book and the subsequent group leading this mission originated from a WhatsApp group of Rio-based international correspondents, of which Phillips was one of the founders. Called Hacks Happy Hour, the group promotes monthly meetings to connect journalists and is a space for sharing opportunities and needs for help.
“Dom was responsible for really changing the Rio journalist scene when he came here,” Fishman says. “He was one of the founders of the Hacks Happy Hour, which before he arrived, it was somewhat of a competitive environment; people didn’t really share sources or communicate that much. And because of the monthly happy hour, it changed the environment and the culture, and people started to be more friendly and collaborate.”
These changes promoted “this sense of unity” between the journalists of the group who “were often dealing with difficult things, and many of them were foreign correspondents, alone in a big country,” Fishman says. And this spirit transcended to mobilize the group’s participants to finish Phillips’ book, he adds. “I think it’s really appropriate that this man who was so skilled at bringing people together ended up doing that with his book.” Making sure this project happened, he says, “It’s a huge relief.”
Phillips left a partially completed manuscript, including the introduction and three and a half chapters, somewhere between a third and a half of the book, Watts says, comparing the process of finishing the book to “an onion.”
At the beginning, he says, Sampaio and Phillips’ sister, Sian Phillips, were “right at the middle,” accompanied by “Dom’s book group,” derived from the Hacks’ group. Beyond Watts and Fishman, the group was formed by Tom Henning, David Davis and Rebecca Carter.
Sampaio shared all Phillips’ book-related materials with the group: computer, external drives and his “famous little notebooks” with his manuscripts; the next step was to choose the writers for the six remaining chapters, Watts says.
Beyond Watts and Fishman, the chapter writers include Jon Lee Anderson of The New Yorker, Eliane Brum of El Pais and Sumaúma and Beto Marubo, an Indigenous campaigner from the Javari Valley. Many of Phillips’ friends wanted to help with the book process and more than 20 people who weren’t chosen to write the chapters helped with editing, fact-checking and translation, Watts says.
There were also hundreds of people who donated money through a crowdfunding campaign to make this book possible, he adds. “This is a collaboration at so many levels of everyone involved and ultimately hundreds of people.” He also highlighted the collaboration of everybody who posted about the book on social media and got involved at the beginning. “For me, it’s all about collaboration and solidarity. That’s really what this is a gesture of.”
Throughout the process, Watts says, the group spent a lot of time listening to one another to make sure everyone’s happy — Phillips’ family first of all — to go ahead with Phillips’ plan “as close to his original intentions as possible.” According to him, the process went smoothly over the course of three years. “We didn’t have any fights, which is amazing actually,” he says. “People didn’t let their egos get in the way. They cared for Dom. They loved Dom.”
In their research to write the chapters, Mongabay articles stood out, Watts and Fishman say. “If nobody else has it, Mongabay will have it. Not only will they have the source perfectly cited, they’ll have perfect links, they’ll have all the details, so it’s not like that confusing version over simplified numbers so that you’re not actually sure what it means,” Fishman says.
Mongabay accounted for at least seven footnotes for Phillips’ book. “You had the most beautiful footnotes,” Watts says. But they ended up being cut, Fishman says, as there were 115 footnotes at the end.
Final word to an Indigenous person
Despite making all efforts to be faithful to Phillips’ plans, Watts says, there were two additions to the book: a chapter that covers Phillips’ and Pereira’s killings, the book project and the process of finishing the book, and one afterword chapter in which the final words in the book goes to Marubo. “The final word goes to an Indigenous person because when you look at Dom’s notes, one part is very clear: Listen to Indigenous people, that’s something that he’s stressed about.”
The original title of the book was How to save the Amazon: Ask people who know. Watts says the publisher wanted to change the whole title to reflect the tragedy but nobody agreed because that’s what Phillips called it. Then the subtitle was changed to “A journalist’s fatal quest for answers” to reflect what had happened “but it still captures that spirit,” Watts says.
Despite the huge amount of work in three years, “It’s been, for me at least, very psychologically healthy,” Watts says. “What happened to Dom and Bruno was so shocking, so painful. And I really just wanted to do something, what can I do? And I think many of us felt like this.”
For him, it’s a way of “not just getting sucked into all the negativity and pain and anger and sadness of what happened” and to look forward to trying to strengthen Phillips’ legacy and at the same time trying to help raise some money for Sampaio. “Everybody signed a document saying this book is only Dom’s book. All the royalties will go to Dom’s estate,” he says, spotlighting Sampaio’s initiative in creating the Dom Phillips Institute in 2024, focused on highlighting the voices of the Amazon and the knowledge of its Native people through education.
‘Dom would definitely not want to be a special case’
On June 5, the Federal Public Ministry in Amazonas brought charges against Ruben Dario Villar, known as “Colômbia,” as the mastermind behind the double homicide of Phillips and Pereira. Such a move followed the conclusion of a two-year investigation that accused him of illegal fishing and poaching in the region and funding and arming the criminal to execute Phillips’ and Pereira’s killings and conceal the victims’ corpses. Villar denied the accusations.
Since the start of the investigation, eight other people have been indicted. The case of three defendants — Amarildo da Costa de Oliveira, known as “Pelado,” Jefferson da Silva Lima and Oseney da Costa de Oliveira — were part of a single lawsuit that set a trial before a jury. But in September 2024, a court decision accepted Oseney Oliveira’s appeal and dismissed him from the lawsuit; the Federal Public Ministry appealed.
“It’s important that the people who called the trigger and they were most involved are held to account, at least symbolically. It’s important to show that there cannot be this level of impunity, that so often is the case,” Fishman says. “But at the same time, for me, personally, it won’t really feel like justice has been done until you are getting higher up and breaking up the criminal networks that put these people in these situations.”
For him, this would mean not only justice for Phillips and Pereira, but also “to first have hope that there is space for progress on preventing the worst possible scenario for the Amazon.”
The world focused on Phillips’ killing in particular, Watts says, because he was a white Western journalist. “But in fact, these kinds of crimes are happening all the time to environmental defenders, sometimes to journalists, and I know that Dom would definitely not want to be a special case,” he says. “He would want the bigger picture and the fact that the attention might be on him and Bruno though, but in fact, that should be a way to talk about the bigger story of what’s happening to environmental defenders and Indigenous people and others who are on the frontline.”
For Watts, despite the “dark stuff” in the book, it sheds a light on its positive elements. “One of the most striking things about Dom’s approach is that he was looking for solutions. So, every chapter is a search for a solution, a search for how to save the Amazon,” he says. “I think that was unusual. Because usually people do focus on the problems.”
Phillips’ book was launched in English in the U.S and in the U.K. in early June. It will be launched in Portuguese in Brazil on June 18 in São Paulo, during the Pacaembu Book Fair. There is no information about the book launch in other cities yet.
On the three-year anniversary of the killing of Phillips and Pereira, The Guardian launched the podcast Missing in the Amazon. On the same day, 50 civil society organizations and journalists signed a manifesto led by the Javari Valley Indigenous Peoples’ Union, UNIVAJA, calling on Brazilian authorities for “more than promises“ as the country prepares to host the COP30 climate change conference in November: “We demand protection for the guardians of the forest. We demand real, urgent and transformative action.”
Banner image: British journalist Dom Phillips on a 2022 trip to the Brazilian Amazon. Image © Alessandra Sampaio.
Karla Mendes is a staff investigative and feature reporter for Mongabay in Brazil and a member of the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network. She is the first Brazilian and Latin American ever elected to the board of the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ); she was also nominated Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) chair. Read her stories published on Mongabay here. Find her on 𝕏, Instagram, LinkedIn, Threads and Bluesky.
Dom Phillips’ posthumous book centers on collaborative work for saving the Amazon
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