

In 2018 I made an epic journey around the world to photograph environmental defenders whose lives were at extreme risk for the stand they were taking. These were not just any old environmental activists, these people were actively putting themselves on the line everyday to oppose the military, corrupt police, drug cartels, big business and armed wildlife poachers. At the time it seemed quite normal, but in hindsight it was insanely dangerous.
The articles are available on The Guardian. The photographs are credited to me and the stories to Jonathan Watts, for the most part we worked separately, and I traveled alone, walking in to situations that I had absolutely no idea about.
The environmental editor Jonathan Watts did a great job writing the stories, and in many cases had already conducted the interviews but on one of the trips to the Philippines I was lucky enough to have him and a videographer Leo Plunkett come along with me.
Six years later and this is the first time I have written about the experience of making The Defenders, and the first time I have allowed myself to reflect on the situation that we put ourselves in over those few days in Mindanao.
We needed the nuns on our side. That was the key to our safety.
Not that the nuns posed any threat to us, but they had the inside information on the volatility of the situation in Datal Bonglangon village and, knowing the reasons why we wanted to visit, they could organise transport and call ahead to lay the groundwork for three white guys turning up in a village which had recently been torn apart by the massacre of 8 farmers.
We were told that we needed to be careful. We had to be honest with the villagers about why we were there, but the soldiers couldn’t know who we were. So the community was prepped by the nuns, and transport was organised. We only had one day because once we were out, if word got around that we were journalists, a second day could be much more precarious for us, a piece of advice we ended up ignoring, and almost regretting.
The village of Datal Bonglangon is basically nestled inside a massive coffee plantation at the top of a mountain. The road is a dirt road that becomes impassable when the rains come. The coffee plantation is guarded by armed soldiers.

The villagers themselves were stuck. The plantation was encroaching upon their land and their resistance was responded to with extreme violence. Whilst the army did not seem to have any jurisdiction over the village, they were clearly keeping a close eye.
I’m not going to go into the full story of the massacre here, you can read the full story by Jonathan Watts for The Defenders series here. But what I will say is that what we encountered when we entered the village was a community torn apart, families who had lost numerous loved ones, and an anger, sadness and frustration that affected us all profoundly.

Leo and I had four days on the island of Mindanao, Jonathan came along only for the one day to the village as he had a tight schedule to stick to. So on day one, Leo and I got the nuns on side.
Day two we visited another village, just to get a feel for the area, to take some establishing shots and to find out the broader context of life in the rural Philippines.
On day three we went to the village…
From what I recall it was a pretty long journey, the roads were bad and the majority of the trip was spent winding up an informal mountain pass. The landscape was beautiful; a lush, thick, deep green that is only achieved through intense humidity and heavy rain.
We were accompanied by three fixers/bodyguards/interpreters who gave us the illusion and confidence of safety. But when we arrived I think it is fair to say that we were all a little on edge.
Jonathan Watts is a tall man. Very tall. And people in The Philippines are obsessed with basketball. As we drove into the village we parked right in-front of the informal village basketball court and, on exiting the car, were greeted with elation from the community who could not believe that, at his height, Jonathan was anything other than a professional basketball player. This broke the ice. We relaxed a little.

As with many visits to communities, we started off with a community meeting to explain why we were there. This was not as simple as it may seem as we became aware of a couple of heavily armed soldiers circling us and eventually standing within earshot of our meeting and observing our every move.
When another man is watching you, whilst holding a machine gun, it’s quite hard to feel comfortable, but I was amazed at how Jonathan managed to find the space and time to conduct long and involved interviews with several members of the community, most notably Marivic Danyan the young