Brazilian photojournalist Sebastião Ribeiro Salgado and his wife Lélia Deluiz Wanick Salgado have spent the last 20 years planting an 1,750-acre forest to transform a barren plot of land in Brazil's Minas Gerais state into a tropical paradise.
When Salgado returned from a traumatic trip covering the Rwandan genocide in 1994, he was shocked to find his family's former cattle ranch in a state of natural degradation.
'The land was as sick as I was – everything was destroyed,' the famed photographer said at a meeting on climate change in Paris in 2015. 'Only about 0.5% of the land was covered in trees.'
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Sebastião and Lélia Salgado have spent 20 years transforming the photographer's desolate former family cattle ranch into a fertile forest
These incredible photos show what a difference 18 years of reforestation can make: Salgado's barren former cattle ranch in 2001 and the lush greenery around that can be found there today
Salgado, now 75, remembered the farm he grew up on as a lush and lively sub-tropical rainforest, but the area had suffered from rampant deforestation and uncontrolled exploitation of natural resources.
His wife had the idea to replant the forest.
'It was so natural, instinctive. The land was so degraded, so horrible. What a bad gift! Why not plant?,' Lélia told Smithsonian Magazine in 2015.
So the award-winning photographer known for his black-and-white depictions of human suffering around the world turned his hand to healing the land of his youth.
In 1998, the couple founded the Instituto Terra, an environmental organization dedicated to the sustainable development of the valley.
They elicited the support of Vale, one of the world’s biggest mining companies and reforestation experts, which donated 100,000 seedlings from its nursery and helped rejuvenate the 'dead soil'.
Animals have returned to the area, including more than 30 species of mammals like this anteater
This small turtle is one of the 15 species of amphibians and reptiles that have returned to the rejuvenated forest
The once-barren land is now a birdwatcher's paradise, with more than 170 species of birds including this saffron finch
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