I had never heard of the journalist Dom Phillips and had no idea he was missing; now I hear he is dead, along with his local guide, and identifiable only by dental records. I guess it does not take long for a body to decompose in the Amazon rainforest. But since his death I have heard and read more about him. He seemed like a nice caring chap, with a mission to save the Amazon rain forest, whose death diminishes me. However, his death does not prevent me taking a critical look at what he was trying to do, and this was best explained by him in an interview with BBC Radio 4 which was replayed on the Today programme over the weekend.
I paraphrase but, when asked why he was working to save the Amazon rain forest, particularly trying to prevent the building of roads through it, he explained at some length along the following lines: if we did not act to save the rainforest, before we knew it someone would build a highway through the Amazon and that would be followed by agriculture and industry, all of which would be detrimental to the way of life of the indigenous tribes who depend on the integrity of the Amazon for their way of life. Well Dom, if you can hear me, what’s not to like about any of that? You seemed able to ignore the fact that you came from a country through which highways have been built, agriculture and industry developed, and there is no semblance of an issue – indigenous or otherwise. Why can other people not have a slice of that cake?
Of course, nobody should rush into ancient areas, overriding local wishes and damaging people’s ways of life. But my guess is that once they see a car and a mobile phone, they’ll be chopping down the rain forest themselves like there’s no tomorrow. “You mean, we can drive from one end of the rain forest to the other in a day and speak to people who are thousands of miles away? Crikey, we send out runners and some of them never come back and the slightest gust of wind and the smoke signals are useless.” It’s almost as if Scottish Enterprise, the Scottish development agency, was building roads through Scotland but decided to stop at The Highlands lest the clansmen living is stone huts, burning peat and chasing sheep through the heather should be disturbed. Economic progress was for the posh folk in Edinburgh, not those primitives whose way of life had to be preserved at all costs.
What is our obsession, thousands of miles removed, with the rainforests? If you read The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjørn Lomborg you realise that the rainforests are massive. While they need to be respected, they don’t particularly need saving and the net total of trees in the world is in the black. All the napalm dropped on Vietnam would hardly make a dent in the Amazonian rainforest and if we plant any more trees, we’ll blot out the sun. I am also assuming that Dom did not travel from the UK to the Amazon by canoe and then walk from the coast. A few planes and motor vehicles were undoubtedly involved. But it’s a one way process, a subtle form of colonialism whereby we arrive from wealthy well-fed developed countries and make sympathetic well-rehearsed noises about the damage we are supposed to be doing there. God forbid if one of the natives asked to reverse the journey and come to see how we live. They might get the impression that we want that all for ourselves while they can run about with loin cloths and spears.
Dear Dom, I am genuinely sorry you met such a ghastly end and shame on the people who killed you. It seems they were involved in illegal fishing operations, and you were on to them. They were nothing but greedy thugs.
Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He is a columnist with Unity News Network and writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.
