Editor’s Note – Lisa McInerney
For our special Climate Issue, which we published last November, I was keen to include a piece about the Amazon. It would have felt strange to put forward a collection of writing engaged with climate without acknowledging the lungs of the earth, our biggest rainforest, and, to quote Brazilian climate scientist Carlos Nobre, ‘one of the pillars of the global climate system’. I got in touch with some of the translators we’ve worked with for their help. James Young (whose translation of an extract from Joca Reiners Terron’s Death and the Meteor appears in the issue) mentioned a collaborative project to finish How to Save the Amazon, the book his friend Dom Phillips was working on when he was murdered, alongside indigenist Bruno Pereira, in Brazil in June 2022. Would I like him to put me in touch with Tom Hennigan, the Irish journalist on the team bringing Dom’s book together? I would! And so Tom wrote this essay for us, honouring Dom’s work and spirit, and reminding us that there is great work that must be done, and, more importantly, that can be done. It’s our privilege to share this with our readers as the final companion piece to our special Climate Issue.
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There is a photograph from Dom’s first trip to the Amazon. He is crouching down, lean, fit-looking and perfectly balanced on his haunches. He is wearing nothing but red swimming togs, a rucksack on his bare back, sunglasses pushed up on his head, looking intently through the viewfinder of a small, rather antique-looking film camera. He still lives in London but has visited Brazil a few times already, increasingly drawn to the country that, within three years, will become home. The photograph was taken at the end of 2004 and Dom is spending the New Year holiday with the Brazilian friends that will make this move so easy. He is on a beach, on the island of Marajó: the world’s largest riverine island, which sits in the mouth of the Amazon river.
The long afternoon shadows that he and his friend Otavio Cury cast on the wet sand indicate Dom is looking through the viewfinder towards the west. Two and a half thousand kilometres in that direction—roughly the distance from Dublin to Kyiv—is the Javari Valley where, seventeen years later, he will be murdered on a reporting trip. A film-maker, Otavio will work through his grief at his friend’s murder by making a deeply felt short in which he imagines Dom remembering their trip together to Marajó in the moments before he was shot dead.
The photo belongs to Otavio but, being in it, he obviously did not take it and I’ve never asked him who did. Instead, I like to assume it was taken by his cousin Henrique Cury. It was Henrique who first brought Dom to Brazil. In the 1990s, he was a partner in Floresta, a pioneering club in São Paulo’s burgeoning electronic music scene. To those of us who know Henrique, it seems perfectly natural that he would send an unsolicited fax to Mixmag, the scene’s London-based bible, inviting it to come and visit. To those of us who knew Dom, then Mixmag’s editor, it seems perfectly natural that he booked a flight and went.
It was the start of a beautiful friendship, between Dom and Henrique, between Dom and Henrique’s many friends and finally, between Dom and Brazil. There are many reasons why he eventually moved to the country but an important one was the obvious deep affinity he felt with it. He initially landed in São Paulo for a year’s sabbatical while he wrote his book on Britain’s superstar DJ culture of the 1990s. But even as he was finishing the book, he was already planning to stay.
He would occasionally mention the trip to Marajó, but did not give any sense that the Amazon loomed especially large in his decision to remain. It would be a few years before he would go there again; another holiday with his old Mixmag mucker David Davies visiting from London. Instead, Dom would organise hiking trips closer to home in São Paulo and later Rio, where he moved in part to be in closer contact with the great outdoors than was possible in the relentlessly urban metropolis that is São Paulo.
So it would be some years before the Amazon came to play a major role in Dom’s Brazilian life. When it did, it was due to his excellence as a reporter. He had already demonstrated this in the first—British—half of his career, which saw him emerge from the world of self-published music magazines to become Mixmag editor during the cultural moment when the UK’s underground rave scene went mainstream. Then, after Superstar DJs Here We Go! had been delivered to his publisher, he turned to his second—Brazilian—act. He quickly learnt Portuguese and immersed himself in Brazilian life and culture. He had a boundless natural curiosity for his new home, allied to the ferocious work ethic of someone always hustling for gigs.
In those first years freelancing in Brazil, there was never any sense that he wondered about his trajectory from the editorship of a prominent UK magazine to jobbing in a country London editors did not fall over themselves to commission stories from. Perhaps he was confident that his natural talents and deep experience as a reporter would see him get his chance once he got up to speed on his new home. Whether he was or not, that is what happened. Within a few years of arriving, he’d gone from Brazil novice to stringer for some of the most important English-language vehicles, and was widely respected among colleagues as one of the best foreign correspondents writing about his adopted home.
He was now working for publications, first the Washington Post and later The Guardian, that had the resources and commitment to cover the Amazon. Most Brazilians never set foot in it. It is far away from the major population centres in a country larger than the continental United States and, for reporters, it’s expensive to get to and time-consuming to travel around. Though still a freelancer, Dom now had the institutional backing to do so. A decade on from his trip to Marajó, he began his serious engagement with the world’s largest rainforest.
This allowed him to marry the personal and professional sides of his personality. Raised in a Merseyside family that would take the camper van off on hiking holidays, Dom loved the outdoors. Not just loved it, but had a deep sense of connection to it. Remember, it was in part the reason he moved to Rio, a city wrapped around forested mountains and washed by the ocean. Time spent in nature fulfilled him in a very real sense. The gruelling details of reporting trips to the jungle would be recounted with his typical self-deprecating humour, leaving you in no doubt he had loved his time on what half-sounded like a particularly gruelling season of Survivor.
And, with his highly refined journalistic instincts, Dom also knew that the Amazon is the most important story in Brazil. Its billions of trees absorb and store billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, making it a crucial bulwark in the fight against climate change. It is also a key climate regulator, pumping rain into central South America’s vast farm belt, which plays a strategic role in the global food supply chain. The fate of the Amazon has planetary implications and Brazil is home to sixty per cent of it, including its central core. With the remaining forty per cent distributed among eight neighbouring countries, it is fair to say the rainforest’s destiny will be decided in Brazil.
Yet the Brazilian Amazon is also a critical frontline in humanity’s war on nature, on the only home we have. The depredations of the logging, mining and ranching industries—sometimes encouraged by the state, sometimes ignored by it, too infrequently confronted by it—mean great tracts of it have already been lost. Between 1541 (the arrival of the Spanish conquistador Francisco de Orellana, credited as the first European to traverse the jungle) and 1970 (the year Brazil’s military dictatorship initiated construction of the Trans-Amazonian Highway) humans cleared just over two per cent of Brazil’s portion of the jungle. In the next half century, that figure rose to somewhere between fifteen and twenty per cent.
Dom covered an astonishing range of subjects during his years in Brazil. He was not an activist, just a reporter, but a very good one who wanted to do serious work. So it makes sense that the longer he lived in Brazil, the more the fate of the Amazon became the focus of his reporting. His pivotal Amazon reporting trip was one in 2018 to the Javari Valley. He joined an expedition by Brazil’s indigenous affairs agency into one of the most remote corners of the jungle to monitor isolated indigenous communities, peoples under threat from a growing spectrum of criminal outsiders. It was on this trip that he met Bruno Pereira, the Brazilian indigenist who led the expedition. His subsequent article makes clear he was deeply impressed by Bruno for his personal charisma and his dedication to vital work.
At some stage, Dom started to think about doing another book, one that would focus on people like Bruno and the indigenous peoples attempting to defend their territories. The title he settled on was How to Save the Amazon. Lest anyone think he was putting forward his own solutions, the subheading was to be ‘Ask the people who know’: people like Bruno and the leaders of the Union of Indigenous Peoples of the Javari Valley, a group he worked with to monitor and prevent illegal fishing in a region the size of Portugal.
Dom took time off from his regular reporting to work on the book. His professional investment in the project was total. He even moved from Rio to the cheaper city of Salvador to make the finances work. In part he was driven by an urgency that came from witnessing first-hand the consequences of the assault on the rainforest that followed the disastrous elevation of the far-right politician Jair Bolsonaro to Brazil’s presidency. His final reporting trip would take him back to the Javari. After that, he would return home to his wife, Alessandra, and write. Instead, on June 5th 2022, as he headed for home, Dom Phillips was murdered alongside Bruno Pereira as they made their way down the Itaquaí River. Dom was 57, Bruno 41.
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A large network of Dom’s friends and colleagues, with the help of donations from supporters, came together to complete and publish How to Save the Amazon. It is now a book of two parts. The first four chapters are those Dom had largely completed by the time he was killed. The remaining six are by contributors tasked with following his original plans. These later chapters are not an attempt to ventriloquise Dom, but to complete his work by, in the words of the project’s editor Jonathan Watts, entering into a dialogue with him.
Like all of Dom’s wide circle, I was shocked by his murder. I remember little about the ten days between when he and Bruno were reported missing and their bodies being found, except the solidifying dread that something terrible had happened, punctured by willed bursts of wild optimism that they would emerge from the forest, shaken but with another Amazonian tale to tell. Brazil is a violent country, but there was anger at the first murder of a foreign correspondent because of the work he was doing.
The completion and publication of How to Save the Amazon is a collective response to this, a determination that his killing would not silence Dom, an attempt to rescue something positive from that terrible June day. His original insight, the thing that drove his project, was itself hugely positive. Again, the book’s full title. How to Save the Amazon: Ask the people who know. That is to say, we can save the Amazon. There are people there doing this work already. We just need to listen to them, empower them.
In recent years, there has been a noticeable rise in planetary doomsterism which is caught up in a feedback loop with creeping public and private inertia on climate change. I know this to be true because at times I succumb to it myself. In 2010, I reported on how ranchers in the Amazonian town of Novo Progresso now accepted that the bad old days of slash-and-burn to open up tracts of forest for cattle were over. Town officials earnestly explained to me they understood that while they would continue ranching on the land they had already cleared, they were to be guardians of the forest that remained. I wrote an optimistic article about how Brazil seemed to have finally got Amazonian deforestation under control.
Just a decade later, Dom was reporting from the same town on its ’fire day‘ of August 2019 when local farmers, emboldened by the recently inaugurated Bolsonaro’s contempt for the environment, torched large tracts of surrounding forest. When helping get How to Save the Amazon ready for publication I was struck by how heavy much of its reporting is, considering what a natural optimist Dom was. The book’s optimistic parts, like the reporting on ranchers reforesting their lands because they see it makes economic as well as environmental sense, sit alongside fire days, land grabs, deforestation, murder and the corruption that allows all this to flourish.
Inevitably, my reading was coloured by Dom’s fate. But even so, it struck me how destruction and violence stalk the book’s pages. Its very title had to be changed from How to Save the Amazon: Ask the people who know to How to Save the Amazon: A journalist’s deadly quest for answers. How to hang onto the positive solutions to the crisis in the Amazon when Dom had been murdered seeking them? Or the fact that charges against various suspects in his murder have been dropped? And that the investigation into the wider criminal network within which the illegal fishermen who confessed to the killings operated seems to have stalled? Or that Beto Marubo—one of the leaders of the indigenous peoples of the Javari, Bruno’s great friend and the writer of the book’s afterword—has said that the two would likely be killed in the valley even today because the criminal factors that caused their murders continue to hold the region in their grip?
But I am doom-spiralling from São Paulo, a couple of thousand kilometres from the Amazon. Dom knew the region much better than I do, knew all the challenges it faced, the threats to it, much more intimately. I don’t imagine that he thought he was risking his life to report on it, but he knew risk was involved. And yet he went, not just to record the violence and destruction there, but also the people making a positive difference, trying to construct a better future for the rainforest and our planet. He knew these stories matter. An instinctive reporter, Dom knew where to look, knew who to listen to. His murder should not negate his reporting or overshadow its optimistic message: that we can still save the Amazon. Dom asked the people who know to tell us how. We should listen to them. And then it is up to each of us to work out what we can do to help, to help them to protect us all from ourselves.
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How to Save the Amazon is published by Ithaka, an imprint of Bonnier Books.
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