Brazilian Couple Spent Two Decades Restoring Their Hometown Forest — Now, the Wildlife Is Returning

In 1994, the renowned Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado (@sebastiaosalgadooficial) arrived in Minas Gerais, a Southeastern state in Brazil, and his hometown. He was returning after documenting the traumatizing episode of the Rwandan genocide, thinking perhaps that his paradisiacal home would offer solace from the harrowing memory. But the moment he stepped inside the town, his jaw dropped. Once a thriving forest, the town was now reduced to a patch of barren land. No greenery to be seen. Animals had stopped coming. Whatever remained of his beloved town broke his heart. Together with his wife Lélia, he vowed to restore the forest and bring back the abundance he was born with, according to a report by The Guardian.

“The land was as sick as I was – everything was destroyed,” Salgado shared with the outlet. “Only about 0.5% of the land was covered in trees. Then my wife had a fabulous idea to replant this forest. And when we began to do that, then all the insects and birds and fish returned and, thanks to this increase of the trees, I, too, was reborn – this was the most important moment.” He and Lélia spent the next two decades transforming the picture of the Brazilian town, one tree at a time.

It didn’t come easily, though. First and foremost, they needed to restore the soil’s vital nitrogen reserves that were all leached away by brash deforestation and annihilating human activities. Besides, the land was crisply baked and dry. The rains, too, didn’t arrive until 1999. Salgado and Lelia recruited locals to participate in their mission and started dotting the land with legumes. Only when the nitrogen was restored could they start planting seedlings. “We made the holes too tight,” Salgado told The Smithsonian. “For weeks I was sick–sick to see this disaster.”

They launched Instituto Terra, intending to carpet the 17,000-acre property with plants and trees to restore it to its natural state. Marrying both the spiritual desire to resurrect their paradise as well as the creative inspiration, they inspired people to come along and start planting trees. Beginning with native plants, they punctuated the ground with over 2.7 million trees. Once again, the lush green forest cradles a bounty of wild visitors. Their chirps, roars, and trills signal that humans are not indispensable. But if nature disappears, there is no life for humans either.

 Although the couple’s efforts paid off, Salgado shared that he is not happy about the fact that the town was messed with in the first place. “For me, the world is like a huge African hut. But, with climate change, it seems we have invented a game of fire that we call the market. The rule is you must keep growing, keep consuming as much as possible. But it means our hut will burn down. None of us will then be safe,” he lamented. Nature, he said, is uncompromisable. If humans, the guardians of nature, take the destructive path, a dying nature would unleash its fury, ultimately leading to the collapse of planetary life.

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