Weekend Listen: The journalist who died trying to save the Amazon

British journalist Dom Phillips’s mission was to expose the destruction of the Amazon rainforest.

In this episode, Nil's feature conversation with two of the people responsible for finishing a groundbreaking, posthumous book by Phillips, who was killed three years ago in Brazil. 

Phillips got his start as a music writer -- whose main claim to fame was coining the term "progressive house", and writing a celebrated history of the rise and fall of superstar DJs. 

Then, in 2007, his work on electronic music took him to Brazil, where he fell in love. First with the place. And then with a person: Alessandra Sampaio. 

But it would be another ten years before Dom began covering the story that would become his sole focus: the brutal destruction of the Amazon rainforest. 

In 2018, he traveled to the remote Javari Valley with Bruno Pereira -- an advocate for Indigenous peoples' rights in Brazil. And in 2022, the pair went back...and then, they went missing. 

In the years since, Brazilian police have charged five people in relation to their murders. And now, a collective of their friends and loved ones has published the manuscript Dom Phillips was working on at the time. It's called "How to Save the Amazon: A Journalist’s Fatal Quest for Answers".

Photography: Gary Calton