The contrast is striking: a bare-looking hillside in one photograph, a sweep of green in another. But the most important part of the Salgados’ forest-restoration story lies between the two images—in the years of work that made the change possible.
A shared project in the Atlantic Forest
Lélia Deluiz Wanick Salgado and photographer Sebastião Salgado founded Instituto Terra in 1998, working to restore degraded land on the family’s former cattle ranch near Aimorés, in Minas Gerais, Brazil.
This is the Atlantic Forest region, not the Amazon. Keeping that geography clear matters because restoration is tied to the local ecosystem, its species and its history of land use.
The institute’s own history describes the founders’ vision and the organization that developed from it. It also records Sebastião’s death in 2025. The work continues through a wider team and institutional effort, rather than remaining the solitary achievement of one famous photographer.
The personal turning point behind Instituto Terra
The 2019 article connected the project with Sebastião Salgado’s return to Brazil after documenting the Rwandan genocide in the 1990s. He found the family landscape badly degraded, and Lélia proposed replanting it. In a 2015 interview, he described both the land and his own state of mind:
The land was as sick as I was – everything was destroyed.
Only about 0.5 percent 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.
The percentage is his recollection in that interview, not a new survey of the property. In the same 2015 interview he explained the method: “Perhaps we have a solution. There is a single being which can transform CO2 to oxygen, which is the tree. We need to replant the forest. You need forest with native trees, and you need to gather the seeds in the same region you plant them or the serpents, and the termites won’t come. And if you plant forests that don’t belong, the animals don’t go there and the forest is silent.” That personal motivation belongs beside the institute’s subsequent team effort, while ecological recovery still needs the longer-term measurements discussed below.
What grew back
Salgado, who had won almost every major award in photojournalism and published more than half a dozen books, returned in the 1990s exhausted after documenting the genocide in Rwanda to find his native region, once covered in lush forest, barren and silent. Planting began in December 1999; by early 2019 the reserve, a 608-hectare private natural heritage reserve, had received more than 2.5 million seedlings of nearly 300 native species, and a fauna survey completed in 2006 already counted 172 bird species. The 2019 version of this article also reported the return of 33 species of mammals, 15 of amphibians, 15 of reptiles and 293 of plants. Restor’s 2024 account of the institute’s first monitoring survey, completed in 2006, gives 33 mammal, 15 amphibian and 16 reptile species, and describes the 293 as native plant species used in the planting rather than species that returned on their own.
The project began against a grim global backdrop. In 2015 the UN Food and Agriculture Organization reported that 129 million hectares of forest, an area almost the size of South Africa, had been lost since 1990, and WWF estimated that deforestation accounted for about 15% of greenhouse-gas emissions. FAO’s later assessment, published in 2020, put net forest loss between 1990 and 2020 at 178 million hectares, but found that deforestation had slowed to about 10 million hectares a year in 2015–2020 from 12 million in 2010–2015.
What the before-and-after images leave out
A canopy photograph can make restoration seem like a single act: plant trees, wait, take another picture. In practice, the questions continue long after planting. Did the seedlings survive? Are appropriate species establishing? Can the site support a more varied community over time?
Counting planted seedlings and measuring a recovering forest are therefore different tasks. A headline total is useful only when its date, area and definition are clear. The number produced by a nursery is not necessarily the number of mature trees standing on the restored property.
Recovery is a process, not an instant replacement
Restoration can improve a damaged landscape without recreating every feature of an old forest immediately. Soil, water, plant diversity and animal communities do not all respond on the same timetable.
That is a reason to value the work more precisely, not less. The optimistic lesson is that degraded land is not always condemned to remain degraded—and that long-term care can achieve things a one-day planting event cannot.
Questions worth borrowing for any tree project
Ask what ecosystem the project aims to restore, which species belong there and how survival is monitored. Look for follow-up evidence, not just photographs of seedlings going into the ground. And ask who will care for the site after the launch-day attention has moved on.
Compare this institutional approach with Jadav Payeng’s decades of forest work in Assam. For another reason to look beyond the most obvious canopy, explore research on the scattered trees of West Africa’s drylands.
More images
Here is what people had to say about the reforestation initiative:
Beyond a single before-and-after view
A paired photograph can reveal striking change, especially when the viewpoint is recognizable. A fuller account would also follow the land between those two moments: what was planted, what persisted and what work continued after planting. The Salgados' story is compelling as a long commitment to one landscape. It should invite questions about sustained restoration rather than imply that every damaged site follows an identical path.
A restoration story needs the years between the pictures
A useful timeline would distinguish the decision to act, the work on the ground and the observations made afterward. Planting is visible and easy to count; continued care can be harder to summarize in one headline. The story benefits when both remain part of the account.
When comparing restoration images, notice the season, framing and area shown. A closer photograph of a greener patch may be beautiful but cannot substitute for a consistent view of the same site. That is a question about how evidence is presented, not a reason to dismiss the effort. Careful comparison gives readers a clearer sense of what the pictures demonstrate.
Explore the related article: Australian Bushfire Regrowth in Murray Lowe's Photographs.
Sources, credits and background: FAO State of the World’s Forests · UN News’ September 2015 forest report · WWF deforestation background · Instituto Terra’s original website credit.
The 2015 background report supplies historical context; its figures are not presented as current forest-loss measurements.
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