Mongabay reporter Karla Mendes has been featured as one of 36 global climate leaders in a new book launched in the U.S. on May 27.
What Will Your Legacy Be?: Conversations With Global Game Changers About the Climate Crisis by author Sangeeta Waldron includes a chapter on Mendes’s investigative work and career trajectory. The chapter on Mendes highlights her use of in-depth investigative reporting to bring justice to communities that are usually not heard.
“I feel honored to have my work featured in such an important book, alongside powerful global change makers,” Mendes wrote on LinkedIn. The book features interviews with activists, scientists and journalists shaping environmental action around the world. Also included are NASA climate scientist Kimberley Miner and Ecuadorian Indigenous Waorani leader Nemonte Nenquimo.
In the chapter on Mendes, she recounts how the devastation of a mining disaster in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais was the catalyst for her pivot from business journalism to the frontlines of environmental reporting.
Since then, Mendes’s investigative reporting has helped correct judicial impunity in cases of violence against Indigenous people in Brazil, and exposed palm oil exporters involved in land grabbing in the Amazon, among many others.
“In environmental reporting, it’s a fight against money,” Mendes says in the book. “All of the destruction of nature is to do with money in terms of supply chains.” And uncovering the schemes that funnel millions into private pockets at the expense of communities and nature is no easy feat.
“We think of nefarious actors as drug barons or human trafficking,” Waldron told Mongabay by phone. “But there are other stories going on which are against Mother Nature. And Karla is one of those guardians who is investigating and exposing these bad actors.”
Today, Mendes shared, she travels with a satellite communicator and checks in three times a day from the field in the Brazilian Amazon, where nine reporters were killed on the job between 2014 and 2024. “Things have changed and it’s riskier, but we won’t stop doing our job,” she added.
Waldron says her book aims to inspire readers to take steps toward making positive change.
“Everyone always asks me: ‘What can one person do?’ And one person can do a lot,” Waldron said. “Journalists like Karla are showing us what one person can do.”
Banner image: Author Sangeeta Waldron at a book launch event. Image courtesy of Sangeeta Waldron.
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