How to Save the Amazon: A journalist’s fatal quest for answers

Readers who are intrigued by fast-paced, from-the-heart writing will be blown away by this disturbing introduction to the tribal population of Brazil’s Amazon basin. Primary author Dom Phillips was assassinated mid-book. A supremely dedicated environmentalist and author, his colleagues picked up the manuscript to capture the rest of the saga.

How to Save the Amazon is set in Brazil, in the vast, age-old rainforests fast being denuded, home to Indigenous tribes. Those hanging on to their traditional lifestyle and livelihoods are threatened by invasive modern methods of destruction. Phillip’s chief villain, Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s former President, is blamed for almost single-handedly denuding the vast forest. Not quite fair: in the 1970s, as the author reminds, maybe a million miners came into the country to cut trees, then cut roads, to expand modern-day civilization in the country, through the world’s most extensive rain forest.

It’s an exciting, vengeful look at a world that hits the headlines in the Western press only occasionally. Individuals, men and women picked out for praise or damnation, are mostly Brazilian, unfamiliar to many readers. This doesn’t detract from the spirit of the book, which is a homage to a traditional lifestyle in a vanishing segment of our world.