Three years ago this Thursday, British journalist Dom Phillips set out on the long journey home after a research trip deep into the Amazon rainforest for a book he was writing. He never made it back to his wife Alê.
Instead he was brutally murdered alongside his travelling companion, Brazilian indigenist Bruno Pereira. They were shot dead by a gang of illegal fishermen who viewed Bruno’s efforts to help local indigenous communities protect their territory as a direct threat to their criminal livelihood.
Dom had wanted to write about the conflict and the efforts to resolve it, which Bruno understood would have to include providing realistic alternatives to those whose living depended on illegal fishing. But in 2022 such a nuanced approach was lost in the rising lawlessness that gripped the Amazon during the far-right administration of Jair Bolsonaro, a government that declared the forest open to plunder by gutting its own agencies responsible for its protection.
Instead Bruno was shot dead and Dom with him, most likely so there would be no witness to the crime. In the 12 days between the two being reported missing and the grim discovery of their bodies, burnt and hastily buried in a shallow grave, their friends had mobilised to pressure authorities into intensifying the initially underwhelming search effort.
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This campaign provided a focus to Dom’s colleagues, many of us caught between desperately hoping for news that he had emerged from the forest with another dramatic Amazonian adventure to tell but increasingly dreading the worst as the days passed.
When word finally came that the bodies had been found, there was at least some consolation that Alê and Bruno’s wife Bia could bring their husbands home, even if just for their funerals, rather than be left stranded in a limbo of uncertainty at their disappearance.
But among Dom’s journalist friends as well as the shock and anger, there was also a determination, borne out of the initial mobilisation during those first agonising 12 days, that his murder would not silence him.
Discussions turned to the possibility of completing How to Save the Amazon, the book he had not been given the chance of finishing himself. Alê quickly entrusted the project to a small editorial group of Dom’s colleagues. She arrived from their home in Salvador for the funeral in Rio de Janeiro with a suitcase full of his electronic devices and his notebooks (which in classic reporter style were borderline illegible).
These she handed over to Andrew Fishman, president of the investigative website the Intercept Brasil, who was a close friend of Dom’s and an important sounding board as he developed his initial idea for the book.
Reviewing the material, the group’s initial task was to work out how much of the book Dom had completed and then what still needed to be done, and more importantly how and by who. Once the word spread that the project would continue, the editorial group was inundated with offers of help.
This reflected the deep affection for Dom as a friend, and he was a great friend to many of us. It was also a demonstration of professional respect for someone who at the time of his death was recognised as one of the best foreign journalists working in Brazil.
This meant the book would achieve the aim of our editorial group’s co-ordinator Jonathan Watts, Dom’s old friend from their days as correspondents based in Rio together and now the Guardian newspaper’s global environment editor who lives much of the year in the Amazon.
Jon wanted the book to be an act of solidarity with a colleague murdered because of his commitment to reporting from the remote front lines of a conflict that has profound consequences for our entire planet. Now, in time for the third anniversary of the murders, How to Save the Amazon is published, its original subtitle, Ask the People Who Know, poignantly changed to, A Journalist’s Deadly Quest for Answers.
This is a necessary reflection of the cruel circumstances that meant others had to take on the task of finishing the book. But Dom’s original subtitle remains hugely relevant. It informs the spirit of the book, which was Dom’s modus operandi as a journalist: get out there, find the people who know, and ask the questions.
(And with Dom it could be so many questions, until he was sure he understood what you were talking about and, more importantly, was convinced you did too.) It is also an optimistic book. The crisis in the Amazon can at times seem overwhelming.
But Dom’s insight was an important one: that the solutions to it are already being implemented, just the people in the rainforest making a positive difference need to be heard, their voices and insights amplified. His book, now out in the world, helps in that effort. It is a worthy legacy for a much-missed friend and colleague.
