From Lens to Land
Sebastiao Ribeiro Salgado is one of the most celebrated documentary photographers of the twentieth century. Born in 1944 in Aimores, a small town in Minas Gerais, Brazil, he grew up on a cattle ranch surrounded by lush Atlantic Forest.
He studied economics and worked briefly for the International Coffee Organization before turning to photography in the early 1970s. Over the next three decades he traveled to over 100 countries, producing powerful black-and-white images of human labor, migration, and suffering for publications worldwide.
By the late 1990s, he was emotionally and physically exhausted. Years of documenting genocide in Rwanda, famine in the Sahel, and displacement across the globe had taken a severe toll.
When he came home to his family's ranch in Minas Gerais in 1998, the landscape of his childhood was gone. The forested hills were barren and eroded. Springs had dried up. The ranch was a wasteland of exposed red earth.
Instituto Terra
It was his wife, Lelia Deluiz Wanick Salgado, who proposed the idea that would change both the land and their lives. Why don't we try to replant the forest?
Together they founded Instituto Terra in 1998, a nonprofit dedicated to restoring the degraded Atlantic Forest ecosystem on and around the family property. The Atlantic Forest is one of the world's most biodiverse biomes and one of the most threatened. Only about 12 percent of its original cover remains.
They started with a nursery to grow native seedlings. Over the following years they planted more than two million seedlings across roughly 1,500 acres, using over 290 native species. Each species was chosen for its role in the ecosystem. Pioneer species for full sun and poor soil. Climax species for the eventual mature canopy.
Results outran their most optimistic projections. Springs that had been dry for decades began flowing again. More than 170 bird species returned, along with mammals, reptiles, and amphibians long absent from the area. The restored forest became a corridor between fragments of remaining Atlantic Forest, letting wildlife move between isolated habitats.
A Second Act
Salgado has described the reforestation as the most important work of his life. There is a single being which can transform CO2 to oxygen, which is the tree. We need to replant the forest.
The experience also reignited his photography. His monumental project Genesis, published in 2013, documented pristine landscapes and indigenous communities around the world. After watching broken land come back, he approached the work with renewed purpose.
Instituto Terra has grown beyond the family property to work with neighboring landowners and communities. Its environmental education programs have reached tens of thousands of students. The organization shares its expertise in native seedling production, watershed restoration, and ecological monitoring with other restoration projects across Brazil.
Healed Together
The transformation of the Salgado ranch from barren cattle land to thriving forest has become one of the most visible examples of large-scale ecological restoration on record.
Wim Wenders' 2014 documentary The Salt of the Earth, which profiles Salgado's photography and the Instituto Terra project, carried the story to millions of viewers.
For Salgado, the forest is proof that environmental destruction is not irreversible. The land was as sick as I was. We healed together.