Over the course of 20 years, award-winning photojournalist Sebastião Salgado and his wife, Lélia Deluiz Wanick Salgado, helped bring new life to a devastated landscape by planting more than 2.5 million trees in southeast Brazil.
In 1998, the couple founded Instituto Terra after inheriting Salgado’s father’s severely degraded cattle ranch in the Doce River Valley. The idea took shape after Sebastião returned from covering the Rwandan genocide, a period he later described as deeply affecting both his health and outlook on life.
“The land was as sick as I was — everything was destroyed,” Salgado said at a Paris climate change meeting in 2015, according to The Guardian. Lélia proposed replanting the forest, and the couple began their work with an initial donation of 100,000 seedlings from a local mining company.
Today, the 1,750-acre property is so densely reforested it can be seen from space. What started with a single planting effort now includes about 150,000 new trees planted each year, with wildlife slowly returning as the forest recovered.
“Trees are the same,” Salgado told Smithsonian Magazine in 2015. “You need to hold them close for a while.”
Sebastião Salgado passed away in 2025, but Lélia and a dedicated team of ecologists continue to run Instituto Terra, which now serves as a center for environmental education, seedling cultivation, and ecological research.
His legacy lives on not only in the millions of trees now standing, but in a shared vision that transformed loss into renewal and love into lasting change.
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