New books ask how we can protect threatened land in the Amazon rainforest and Hawaii

Summary

NPR's Book of the Day: Protecting Threatened Lands in the Amazon and Hawaii

Release Date: July 11, 2025
Podcast: NPR's Book of the Day
Host: Andrew Limbong
Description: Exploring today's most compelling books, this episode delves into two deeply reported works addressing the urgent need to protect threatened lands in the Amazon rainforest and Hawaii. Through insightful conversations with authors and contributors, listeners gain a profound understanding of the challenges and personal stories behind these environmental battles.

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1. Preserving the Amazon: "How to Save the Amazon" by Dom Phillips

Overview:
The episode opens with a poignant discussion about Dom Phillips, a dedicated journalist who was tragically killed in the Amazon rainforest while working on his book, How to Save the Amazon. Phillips' untimely death left his work unfinished, but his widow, Alessandra Sampaio, and co-author Jonathan Watts took on the monumental task of completing the book, ensuring that Phillips' mission to protect the Amazon continued.

Key Discussions:

• Phillips' Legacy and Mission:
  Alessandra Sampaio emphasizes the deep connection Dom had with the land and its people. She explains, "Phillips was deep in a part of the Amazon rainforest known as the Javari Valley, halfway through writing his book about the Amazon when he and his colleague Bruno Pereira were shot and killed" (01:44).

• Collaborative Effort to Complete the Book:
  Jonathan Watts shares the emotional and practical challenges faced in finishing the book. He reflects, "After the funeral, it was so intense and I think that my way to keep going was to finish this book" (02:10). The team faced significant hurdles, including deciphering Phillips' illegible handwriting, which proved to be a formidable obstacle (06:03).

• Role of Indigenous Communities:
  A crucial theme in the book is the indispensable role of indigenous people in protecting the Amazon. Watts recounts his interactions with indigenous communities, stating, "They say to me, because I went in Javari Valley three times and the first time I was there, one guy hugged me and said to me, now you are part of our family, because Dom was part of our family" (03:11). This deep bond underscores the collaborative spirit necessary for conservation efforts.

• Defiance and Solidarity:
  Completing the book served as an act of defiance against those who sought to silence Phillips. Watts articulates, "It's defiance because it's sending out a message that killing a journalist won't silence them, that others will rally around and finish their work" (08:43). Additionally, the project fostered a sense of solidarity among friends, family, and contributors, helping to share the emotional burden of Phillips' loss.

Notable Quotes:

• Alessandra Sampaio:
  "Phillips was this person very committed with people. He really liked to have relationships with people." (02:35)

• Jonathan Watts:
  "He had the connection with people. He really liked to have relationships with people." (02:35)
  "It's defiance because it's sending out a message that killing a journalist won't silence them." (08:43)

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2. Land, Legacy, and Responsibility in Hawaii: "A Story of Family, Land and Legacy in Old Hawaii" by Sarah Kahaulani Gu

Overview:
Transitioning to the second book, NPR introduces Sarah Kahaulani Gu's A Story of Family, Land and Legacy in Old Hawaii. Gu delves into the rising land costs in Hawaii and the profound impact on native Hawaiians' relationship with their ancestral lands. The narrative intertwines personal family history with broader socio-economic and cultural issues facing Hawaii today.

Key Discussions:

• Ancestral Land and Heritage:
  Gu narrates her family's deep historical ties to Hawaii, stating, "This land in my family goes back to the kingdom of Hawaii... given to my ancestor more than 175 years ago from King Kamehameha III" (11:56). This heritage includes a hidden native Hawaiian ancient temple, preserved by her family amidst historical upheavals.

• Meaning of "Kuleana":
  The title of the book, Kuleana, translates to "responsibility." Gu explains, "It's the perfect title for this book because it also explains the journey that I go on to really embrace it and understand it in a new context" (13:19). This concept embodies the personal and collective responsibility towards preserving Hawaiian land and heritage.

• Crisis of Rising Property Taxes:
  In 2019, Gu received alarming news about a 500% hike in property taxes on her family's land. This crisis forced her family to confront their relationship with the land, transitioning from ownership to stewardship. Gu states, "It was really a question about our relationship to it now that we are not living and we don't plan to live on this" (13:51).

• Broader Implications for Native Hawaiians:
  Gu connects her personal story to the larger narrative of land loss experienced by native Hawaiians. She highlights historical events such as the overthrow of the Hawaiian government, sugarcane plantation impacts, and federal land takeovers as factors contributing to the displacement and economic struggles of native communities (14:25).

• Impact of Tourism and Billionaire Land Acquisition:
  The influx of millions of tourists and billionaires purchasing vast estates exacerbates land scarcity and drives up property values, leaving native Hawaiians struggling to afford land and maintain their cultural practices. Gu emphasizes the unsustainable nature of this trend: "It's a place where there's a finite amount of land... something's really broken" (15:06).

• Call to Action for Visitors:
  Gu urges tourists to educate themselves about Hawaii's unique environment and culture before visiting. She advises, "Go there with an open mind and go there knowing that it's going to be a very unique experience... to also understand" (16:10).

Notable Quotes:

• Sarah Kahaulani Gu:
  "It's not real estate to us, but it was really a question about our relationship to it." (13:57)
  "A majority of native Hawaiians live outside of Hawaii... it's happening now with the world's billionaires who are snapping up a lot of acreage." (14:25)
  "Hawaii is a place where there's a finite amount of land... something's really broken." (15:06)
  "I want people to read my book if they're visiting Hawaii... understand it's a fragile ecosystem." (16:57)

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Conclusion

This episode of NPR's Book of the Day offers a compelling exploration of two critical works focused on environmental conservation and cultural preservation. How to Save the Amazon not only chronicles the perilous journey of Dom Phillips but also exemplifies the resilience of a community committed to safeguarding one of the world's most vital ecosystems. Meanwhile, A Story of Family, Land and Legacy in Old Hawaii provides an intimate look into the struggles faced by native Hawaiians amid escalating land pressures and cultural displacement. Together, these narratives underscore the urgent need for collective responsibility and informed action to protect our planet's most threatened landscapes.

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Notable Contributors:

• Alessandra Sampaio: Widow of Dom Phillips and co-author of How to Save the Amazon.
• Jonathan Watts: Journalist and co-author of Dom Phillips' book.
• Sarah Kahaulani Gu: Author of A Story of Family, Land and Legacy in Old Hawaii.
• Michelle Martin: NPR correspondent interviewing Sarah Kahaulani Gu.

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This summary is crafted to provide a comprehensive understanding of the episode's content, highlighting key discussions and valuable insights from the featured authors and contributors.

Transcript

[Andrew Limbong]

Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong. Here's a simple premise for a A reporter goes somewhere, learns something and comes back to write about it. But it's never that simple, is it? Today we've got two deeply reported books that take you to unexpected places. Up ahead, a reporter comes to terms with what her ancestral land in Hawaii means to her. But first, Dom Phillips was a journalist and he was reporting in the Amazon rainforest when he was killed. He was working on a book titled how to Save the Amazon, which is out now thanks to his widow, Alessandra Sampaio, who rallied together a crew of contributors, including journalist John Watts, to continue reporting and finish the book. Today on the pod, Watts and Sampaio talk to NPR's Arshapiro about what it meant to keep Dom Phillips work alive and how one of the biggest hurdles was actually Phillips handwriting. That's ahead.

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[Alessandra Sampaio]

Phillips was deep in a part of the Amazon rainforest known as the Javari Valley, halfway through writing his book about the Amazon when he and his colleague Bruno Pereira were shot and killed, allegedly by men involved in an illegal fishing operation. Dom's widow, Alessandra Sampaio, told me she knew almost immediately that his unfinished book had to be completed.

[Jonathan Watts]

After the funeral, it was so intense and I think that my way to keep going to keep alive, actually it was finish this book.

[Alessandra Sampaio]

That effort took three years. It involved a team of co writers and editors and now the book is out called how to Save the Amazon. A Journalist's Fatal Quest for Answers.

[Jonathan Watts]

Don was this person before being a journalist. He was this person very committed with people. He had the connection with people. He really like to have relationship with people.

[Alessandra Sampaio]

The presence of indigenous people seems very important to Dom's project, to the finished book, to answering the question how to save The Amazon. Can you tell me about that relationship he built and the relationship that you continue with indigenous Amazonian people?

[Jonathan Watts]

Yes, indigenous around Brazil, not just in Amazon, especially in the Javari Valley. They say to me, because I went in Javari Valley for three times and the first time I was there, one guy hugged me and said to me, now you are part of our family, because Don was part of our family, because he died trying to protect us. So now we will take care of you and you will take care of us. So I have this commitment with them. And they also say that Don and Bruno became spirits of forest. So now they continue protecting rainforest and its inhabitants.

[Alessandra Sampaio]

Halfway through the book, there is a photograph of these two large crosses in the rainforest. And below the image it says, Dom reached this far in drafting the book by the time of his murder on June 5, 2022. From this point on, his friends have worked with his plans and notes to complete the missing chapters.

[Jonathan Watts]

These for me, was so hard to see and to read. In that time that I finished to read the Dawn's chapter, I realized that dawn was dead. Of course that I know this, but it's another way to feel this again, because I remember a lot our conversations. And when this finish, it's something like, stop this. These memories. You know what I mean?

[Alessandra Sampaio]

Yeah. You had something to pour your emotion and effort into to preserve his memory. And that project is now done.

[Jonathan Watts]

Yes, there is his legacy. And this case tortured so many people.

[Alessandra Sampaio]

One of the journalists who helped finish the book is Jonathan Watts. He remembers after his friend was killed asking, what can we do?

[Jonathan Watts]

And so the spirit of this was very much, this will be done. It was an act of defiance. So the instruction I gave to every contributor was go to the places Dom went, talk to the people Dom talked to, look for the solutions that Dom was looking for. But in the end, have a dialogue with Dom. Try to get Dom involved, Use your memories of Dom. And I think, because there was a sort of a shared style and a shared approach, that instead of being very different voices for each chapter, it sort of comes together in a kind of a polyphonic whole where all the different voices actually come together in unison.

[Alessandra Sampaio]

It's clear from reading the book that the task would have been easier if his handwriting were a bit more legible.

[Jonathan Watts]

Yes. Just about every contributor pointed out how much of a challenge it was to decipher his scroll.

[Alessandra Sampaio]

Tell us about how this translated specifically to your chapter. You write the last chapter in the book where you try to actually answer the question that the book's Title how to save the Amazon poses you ask. What was his conclusion?

[Jonathan Watts]

Yes. So I was left, like many of the chapter contributors, with a riddle. I knew that Dom had written some references to how he wanted the book to end. So he'd said, for example, listen to indigenous people. That was one very prominent phrase. And another phrase was close on the scene in Medicilandia with the students and the professor. And wow, I knew the first, you know, listen to indigenous people. Okay, that was. That was very clear. And that's something I could follow. The second part was a real mind bender, because who are the students?

[Alessandra Sampaio]

Who's the professor?

[Jonathan Watts]

Who's the students? Exactly. What's going on? Where do I begin? I knew that medicinalandia was a town, and fortunately, the neighboring town to where I live, I also live in the Amazon rainforest. But I spent more than a year trying to solve this conundrum. And eventually an old friend of Dom's called Daniel Carmagos, a Brazilian journalist, he suggested, look, why don't you talk to the driver Dom was using at the time? And he passed on the contact. And sure enough, that unlocked everything. And the driver, a guy called Elio, he said, yeah, sure, I can take you to all those places. And that professor and those students, I know them. And my heart leapt at that point. I was just like, yes, yes, yes, here we go. And sure enough, we went to the same places, talked to the people, and at the very end, I looked at the visitor's book of the last person I spoke to and one of the last people that Dom would have spoken to on this particular trip. And there. There it was, that. That scroll. And so I ended the book, hopefully at least close to the spirit in which Dom intended.

[Alessandra Sampaio]

The book itself has a message, but the act of completing the book sends a different message. What message do you think that sends?

[Jonathan Watts]

It's two things. It's defiance and it's solidarity. It's defiance because it's sending out a message that killing a journalist won't silence them, that others will rally around and finish their work and if possible, even amplify their work. And then the solidarity was just a coming together of this huge number of friends and family. And it was a way for us to kind of help each other and divide the work that we have to do, but also divide some of the suffering that we felt with the really extraordinarily horrible and brutal death of our friend and. And the guide he was with, who he. He admired enormously and who was very important to helping to save the Amazon. Bruno Pereira.

[Alessandra Sampaio]

Jonathan Watts is one of the co authors of the Dom Phillips book How to Save the Amazon A Journalist's Fatal Quest for an. Thank you so much for the conversation.

[Jonathan Watts]

Thank you Ari. I really appreciate your interest.

[Alessandra Sampaio]

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[Andrew Limbong]

Sarah Kehaulani Gu is a journalist who's got a book out titled A Story of Family, Land and Legacy in Old Hawaii. And it touches on the soaring costs of life in Hawaii and how that's changing native Hawaiians relationship to the land there. Here's NPR's Michelle Martin.

[Michelle Martin]

What is Hawaii without Hawaiians? That's the question our next guest tried to answer in her new book. Every year millions of tourists vacation on the Hawaiian Islands. Billionaires such as Oprah, Larry Ellison and Mark Zuckerberg own large estates there. Meanwhile, the price of land has gotten so high that few farms can afford to grow crops for local consumption and and lifelong residents are leaving or living precarious lives in overcrowded or substandard conditions. Sarah Kahaulani Gu knows the story of land loss in Hawaii all too well. She's a journalist, a former colleague of ours, in fact, and the author of A Story of Family, Land and Legacy in Old Hawaii. Sarah, thanks so much for joining us.

[Sarah Kahaulani Gu]

Thank you for having me, Michelle.

[Michelle Martin]

You know, I have to say I knew that you had roots in Hawaii, and I guess I have to say I pictured like a grandma house with like doily lace doilies or something, you know what I mean? But in your case, this is land that was passed down for generations from native royalty. So tell us about it.

[Sarah Kahaulani Gu]

Yeah, it actually this land in my family goes back to the kingdom of Hawaii, if you can believe it. It was given to my ancestor more than 175 years ago from King Kamehameha III. And this land is it's tropical rainforest, jungle. It's in a very remote part of.

[Michelle Martin]

Haw where you tell this amazing story of like the first time you went there, you were taken there by your dad. You go on this three hour journey and then you get out and then you still have to hike. But then when you get there. It's magical.

[Sarah Kahaulani Gu]

It was magical. And when we got there, I was invited into this family secret as well. It wasn't just the land, but we also hiked to what I learned was a native Hawaiian ancient temple. It's about the size of a Costco, and it was hidden in the jungle by my family.

[Michelle Martin]

Why was that a secret?

[Sarah Kahaulani Gu]

After the missionaries came to Hawaii, you know, they converted a lot of the leaders in the royal family of the royal court, the Hawaiians, and they gave up a lot of their religious practices, and so that included the temples which were destroyed. This temple in particular was kept hidden. I think the reason that they didn't talk about it was they wanted to preserve it.

[Michelle Martin]

Amazing. So what does Kuleana, the title of your book, what does it mean?

[Sarah Kahaulani Gu]

Yeah, it means responsibility, and that's the basic definition. But a lot of Hawaiian words have multiple definitions depending on their context. And the word, I think, is the perfect title for this book because it also explains the journey that I go on to really embrace it and understand it in a new context.

[Michelle Martin]

So to that end, in 2019, you get an email from your dad letting you know that your family's. The property taxes on the land were scheduled to go up by 500.

[Jonathan Watts]

And.

[Michelle Martin]

That sets off something of a crisis. So say more about that.

[Sarah Kahaulani Gu]

Right. We knew that we needed to act. I think that we knew that this kind of thing might happen. And it forced us to decide what is our relationship to it now that we are not living and we don't plan to live on this. It's not real estate to us, but it was really a question about our relationship to it.

[Michelle Martin]

You write that this whole experience and dealing with this tells a bigger story. So what is that story?

[Sarah Kahaulani Gu]

Today, a majority of native Hawaiians live outside of Hawaii, but this has been a slow churn. And it, you know, happened with the sugarcane plantations. It happened with the government overthrow. It happened with military land takeover, federal government land takeover. And it's happening now with the world's billionaires who are snapping up a lot of acreage.

[Michelle Martin]

Is that partly why the property taxes have gone up, are escalating so rapidly? Because the value of the land is escalating so rapidly because people are buying it up.

[Sarah Kahaulani Gu]

Right. I mean, Hawaii's a place where there's a finite amount of land.

[Michelle Martin]

Well, so a lot of people are familiar with that terrible fire in Maui in the historic town of Lahaina. But what I understood from your book is that this is actually a bigger issue. It's not just a. Like a Specific, tragic occurrence it is.

[Sarah Kahaulani Gu]

The fire exacerbated that problem, but it has long existed. And so when you have a system where you once had a Hawaiian island chain that was totally able to grow its own food and support its people to now it's importing 90% of its food and, you know, 9 million people are visiting a year and, you know, all these homes are sitting empty for visitors and not enough housing for local people. Something's really broken.

[Michelle Martin]

So you have a Chinese name, Gu, but you know what I mean? You're a polyglot. You're a mix. You're a mix. And so the reason I raise that, because you raised that. But also people look at that and they think, well, then who has the claim here? Like, why would people have any more claims since a lot of people came to Hawaii from everywhere? So how do you think about that?

[Sarah Kahaulani Gu]

I didn't grow up in Hawaii. I'm very clear about that. I grew up in Southern California, and I've spent the last 20 years living in Washington, D.C. and when this crisis of our land came up, that was, you know, the first thing that felt, you know, uncomfortable to ask is, you know, what does this land mean to me when I'm raising my children so far away? How will they feel? And so I realized that it starts with me. And I don't know how else to explain it except that I've always felt Hawaii is a part of me and called me and had been calling me back.

[Michelle Martin]

What would you say to people who, you know, if they read your book and they think, huh, you know, I'm part of the problem, but it's a place of dreams. I mean, it's the place of dreams. It's part of the United States. How do you want people to think about it?

[Sarah Kahaulani Gu]

Oh, well, first of all, I want people to read my book if they're visiting Hawaii. That's one of the reasons I wrote it. I think the unique thing about Hawaii is its beautiful environment, it's beautiful culture, it's a fragile ecosystem. So educate yourself a little bit about that before you go and go there with an open mind and go there knowing that it's going to be a very unique experience. You're not going there to, you know, just be served. You're going there to also understand.

[Michelle Martin]

Sarah Kahaulani Gu is the author of A Story of Family, Land and Legacy in Old Hawaii. Sarah, thank you so much for talking with us.

[Sarah Kahaulani Gu]

Thank you, Michelle.

[Andrew Limbong]

That's it for this week on NPR's Book of the Day. Let us know what you think you can write to [e-mail] I'm Andrew Limbong. The podcast is produced by Chloe Weiner and edited by Megan Sullivan. Our founding editor is Petra Maier. The show elements for this week were produced and edited by Adriana Gallardo, Adam Beer and monsieur Khurana, Eddie McNulty, Samantha Balaban, Gabe O', Connor, Todd Mundt, Emiko Tamagawa, Elena Burnett and William Troup. Yolanda Sanguini is our executive producer. Thanks for listening.

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