How to Save the Amazon

GUARDIAN 2025 BOOK TO LOOK FORWARD TO

'Bold, pacy, bursting with optimism and filled with vivid descriptions, this is the work of an indomitable soul' - Guy Shrubsole

'A defiant triumph of a book' - Gaia Vince

'An important book which we should all read' - Andrea Wulf

An urgent work of reportage which takes the reader deep inside the Amazon rainforest, and shows that even if you kill a journalist, you cannot silence a story.

RECIPIENT OF A WHITING FOUNDATION AWARD

On 5 June 2022, award-winning journalist Dom Phillips was working on this book, alongside the indigenous expert Bruno Pereira, when they were both shot. They are believed to have been assassinated by one of the criminal networks whose ecological exploitation they were working to expose.

As the world becomes more aware of the significance of the Amazon, home to nearly 400 billion trees, working in this vast region has become ever more dangerous for activists and journalists. Fires, land grabs, and the invasion of reserves have all spiked over recent decades, pushing the world's biggest forest ever closer to a point of no return. The last few years have seen efforts to reduce deforestation, but the question remains; can we save this globally essential ecosystem before it is too late?

Dom's important and ultimately hopeful book argues the answer is yes. A group of expert writers took up his partially completed manuscript, committed to his mission of uncovering the truth about deforestation and searching for solutions. Blending in-depth reporting and encounters with indigenous activists, ecologists, farmers, and political figures, How to Save the Amazon is a dazzling account of how we can fight ecological destruction and stand in solidarity with the Earth's environmental defenders.