In 1998, a war photographer inherited a cattle ranch stripped of its rainforest; over the next 20 years, he and his wife planted 2 million trees by hand, brought back the dried-up springs, and turned it into a protected nature reserve

In the 1990s, Sebastião Salgado inherited his family farm in Minas Gerais, Brazil, and found the land reduced to little more than eroded, bare ground. According to Smithsonian Magazine's reporting on Salgado, he described the property as a "bare crust." He and his wife, cultural producer Lélia Wanick Salgado, decided to replant it themselves. According to a 2025 study published in Nature Communications, structured forest restoration on private land in Brazil's Atlantic Forest can increase tree cover by 10 to 20 percentage points over land left alone, the kind of recovery the Salgados achieved by hand, years before national programs existed.

A photographer who had seen too much
According to Global Voices’ reporting on the couple, Salgado gave up a career as an economist in 1973 to spend decades photographing war, famine and mass migration around the world. He said he felt “ashamed to belong to the human species” after seeing the Rwandan genocide and the Yugoslav war in the 1990s. Returning to his boyhood home of Aimorés, a town of some 25,000 souls in the state of Minas Gerais, he found the family fazenda barren and dying.

Salgado died on May 23, 2025, at the age of 81. According to PBS's report on his death, a form of malaria he contracted in Indonesia in 2010 had been troubling him for years, eventually developing into leukemia and worsening his health. His ashes were scattered on the land he spent two decades restoring.

From barren ranch to protected reserve
In 1998 Sebastião and Lélia Wanick Salgado founded Instituto Terra, a nonprofit organization dedicated to environmental education and ecosystem restoration. The 600-hectare site was once part of Salgado’s family ranch and had been degraded by years of cattle farming, Global Voices reported, much like the wider destruction of Brazil’s Atlantic Forest. In December 1999, they began replanting with the help of local students. Over the next two decades, the couple and their team planted more than 2 million trees on the property, a widely shared claim that fact-checkers at Snopes verified as true.

The couple later designated the land as a Private Natural Heritage Reserve, a protected status under Brazilian law. As of its 2023 annual report, the property now has over 3 million native trees on 709 hectares of restored forest, and native wildlife has returned to the site. That recovery matters for more than just one farm. That same report estimates that 80 percent of tree species native to the Atlantic Forest are at risk of extinction.

The science behind the comeback
Reforestation creates trees, but it can also bring back water. According to Deutschland.de's coverage of the project, springs on the farm that had gone dry, left unprotected from sun and cattle, began flowing again as tree cover matured, though the team lost roughly 60 percent of its first seedlings before learning what worked

That pattern lines up with the science: a 2025 study in Science of the Total Environment found that forest restoration in Atlantic Forest streams improves water quality and habitat, with older and larger restored areas showing the most recovery. That mirrors what local farmers near Instituto Terra have reported: one, whose family spring has supplied water since 1961, said he hopes the replanting keeps it flowing for good. The Yale School of the Environment’s review of Atlantic Forest restoration found that projects with a high diversity of native species tend to recover more quickly and hold up better over time than single-species plantations.

Sweetening the land
Instituto Terra has grown far beyond the original farm. Its newer Terra Doce program combines cacao and coffee farming with native trees to support small and mid-sized farmers across the wider Rio Doce basin, Global Voices reported. The first stage of the program, which is expected to last for five years, aims to revive 4,200 natural springs through the planting of 2 million more trees using this agroforestry model.

Teaching the next generation
Education has been part of the mission from day one. The institute’s Terrinhas program has reached more than 80,000 children and teachers in public schools around Aimorés, and in 2024, 560 students completed a seven-month course. The institute is now run by the couple’s son Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, who has said the long-term goal is to reshape the economy of an 85,000-square-kilometer region around forest-based agriculture, according to Global Voices.

A forest that outlived him
Salgado didn't live to see the forest fully grown. Global Voices reports that Lélia has said it is still young, its canopy not yet fully formed. For American readers watching their own wildfires and droughts and disappearing wetlands, the lesson from Minas Gerais is simple: a landscape written off as ruined can still come back, given two decades, millions of trees, and people stubborn enough to stay with it.