5x15 online presents: Jonathan Watts & Gaia Vince on How to Save the Amazon

5x15 is delighted to welcome Jonathan Watts, global environment editor at the Guardian, for a special online event. He will be in conversation with award-winning author Gaia Vince, exploring the life and legacy of British journalist Dom Phillips, who was shot and killed in 2022 while investigating ecological exploitation in the Amazon.

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, How to Save the Amazon, argues the answer is yes. After Dom's death, a group of expert writers, led by Jonathan, took up his partially completed manuscript, committed to his mission of uncovering the truth about deforestation and searching for solutions.

Join us for a poignant and illuminating online discussion about fighting ecological destruction and standing in solidarity with the Earth's environmental defenders.

Praise for How to Save the Amazon

'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

Jonathan Watts is an author and journalist based in the Amazon rainforest. He is global environment editor for The Guardian and founder of the Rainforest Journalism Fund and Sumaúma.com. A veteran foreign correspondent previously based in Tokyo, Beijing and Rio de Janeiro, Jonathan covered two tsunamis, three earthquakes, one cyclone, two bombings, a G8 conference, two world cups, three Olympics and interviewed numerous state leaders. He switched to full time environmental reporting after writing the eco-travelogue, When a Billion Chinese Jump. He is now living on the climate and biodiversity frontline in the Amazonian town of Altamira.

Gaia Vince is an honorary senior research fellow at UCL and a science writer. She has held senior editorial posts at Nature and New Scientist, and her writing has featured in newspapers and magazines including the Guardian, The Times and Scientific American. In 2015, she became the first woman to win the Royal Society Science Book of the Year Prize solo for her debut, Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made, and she is also the author of Transcendence: How Humans Evolved Through Fire, Language, Beauty and Time. Her latest book, Nomad Century, is an urgent investigation of the most underreported, seismic consequence of climate change: how it will force us to change where – and how – we live.

Dom Phillips was a highly experienced British freelance journalist. He moved to Brazil in 2007 and wrote extensively for British and American newspapers such as the Guardian and Washington Post. In 2023, How to Save the Amazon was awarded a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant by the Whiting Foundation. In June 2022, Dom Phillips and his colleague Bruno Pereiria were killed in a remote part of the Amazon while researching this book.

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