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

“A book both brilliant and broken, [and] one that is ultimately as inspiring and devastating as the Amazon itself.”
—The Guardian

"The book nearly died with him in the Amazon. But the story endured. . . [Chapters are] rooted in conflict, but searching for solutions."
—The New York Times

Journalist Dom Phillips traveled deep into the Amazon rainforest searching for solutions to the problem of deforestation, a threat to the local ecosystem, native tribes, and the global climate. When he was murdered in the Javari Valley by a group of environmental criminals, a cohort of journalists and activists took up his work to finish his book and share his important message.

During the dark days of the Bolsonaro administration, British journalist Dom Phillips set out to accomplish an ambitious goal: through research, interviews, and site visits deep in the rainforest, he would emerge with a book answering the question—how can we save the Amazon? Traveling with his companion Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira, Dom’s adventure includes trekking through Amazonia to see where ranching, fires, illegal fishing, mining, the drug trade, and urbanization have deforested and degraded millions of acres of important forest, degraded ecosystems, and created dangerous conditions for the Indigenous tribes who have called the Amazon home for thousands of years.

Jair Bolsonaro came into power on a platform of anti-environmental exploitation and deregulation. During his term, deforestation in the Amazon, the “lungs of Planet Earth,” increased exponentially as environmental criminals took advantage of lax rules, advantageous land use policy, and the difficulty of enforcing laws in a remote area of immense size.