The Book Nearly Died With Him in the Amazon. But the Story Endured.
In 2018, the British journalist Dom Phillips joined a 17-day expedition into the Javari Valley, a vast, nearly inaccessible Indigenous land on the western edge of the Brazilian Amazon, tracking signs of an isolated group increasingly threatened by illegal activity.
It was a grueling journey: 650 miles by boat and foot, crossing treacherous log bridges, dodging snakes and pushing through suffocating forest. The river, when it reappeared, offered both relief and what Phillips later called moments of 'exquisite loveliness.'
He was struck by the Indigenous guides' command of the 'forest's secrets,' but even more so by Bruno Pereira, the expedition leader and a seasoned official at Funai, Brazil's Indigenous protection agency.
Phillips saw him as a public servant deeply committed to protecting Indigenous peoples (though he was not himself Indigenous), and able to navigate the Javari with unmatched ease. When he returned to the region to work on a book, he set out to document how an Indigenous patrol was protecting the largely ungoverned territory — an effort then led by Pereira.
The two men ran afoul of an illegal fishing gang and were killed in June 2022. But the story did not die with them.
Journalist friends and family have brought Dom Phillips's work to life with the release of 'How to Save the Amazon: A Journalist's Fatal Quest for Answers.' Over three years, they completed the half-finished manuscript thanks to crowdfunding, grants and, finally, a willing publisher.
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