Formerly barren land in Brazil is now thriving with hundreds of new flora and fauna thanks to the efforts of Sebastião Salgado and his wife Lélia.
Growing deforestation is a big issue for the sustainability of our environment. But individuals like famed photographer Sebastião Ribeiro Salgado and his wife Lélia are trying to save it. The Brazilian couple started a project to plant two million trees and now, 20 years later, the seeds have grown into a lush forest in the Minas Gerais region of Brazil
. It all started in 1994 when Salgado had just returned home from a traumatic project covering the devastations of the genocide in Rwanda. Looking to heal himself, Salgado decided to take a break by taking up the family farm which was located in the Minas Gerais area. But what he saw there devastated him even more: what was once a rich forest had morphed into a severely damaged landscape due to rampant deforestation and disappearing wildlife. “The land was as sick as I was — everything was destroyed,” Salgado toldThe Guardian. The land, he said, was about only 0.5 percent covered in trees. However, the damaged environment sparked inspiration in Salgado’s wife Lélia, who came up with the idea to replant the forest. What sounded like an impossible feat was realized in the founding of Instituto Terra, an environmental organization dedicated to the sustainable development of the area of the Valley of the River Roce just four years later.
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