Many people are indignant waking up in the morning watching the sun and feeling the heat and after a few hours the temperature has dropped so much that you need other clothes than the ones you started your day with. Especially when they would see them with horror catastrophic fires that engulfed vast areas in the Amazon for months.
About 20 to 25 years ago, the debates about climate change and the impact that the catastrophe on our planet would have on our lives were being mocked. And several times those who rang the alarm were treated as graphic.
If we think about what is happening in the last two years, even in areas of the Earth where until recently the weather conditions were relatively smooth and followed the pattern of the times, it is now more than clear that the gloomy future for which some were preparing us has come. We live it every day.
One man, however, about 30 years ago defied this joke and thought of doing something that would have a visible impact on his life, his family and the environment in which he lived. The award-winning photographer Sebastiao Salgado saw it Forest and after 3 decades he saw the trees. And with them a biodiversity of flora and fauna that was reborn through its ashes.
Sebastiao Salgado is one of the few truly great photographers alive on our planet. He has been awarded for his work and has gone down in history as the photographer who sees the Earth without any borders and the people without color.
In 2014, Salgado's life became widely known through Wim Wenders' documentary "The Salt of the Earth", which he co-wrote with Giuliano Ribeiro Salgado, the son of the renowned Brazilian press photographer. Much of the documentary showed Salgado and his wife trying to regenerate a vast area of "scorched earth" in the Maine Valley, the Rio Doce freshwater river, in Atlantic coast of Brazil. The birthplace of the award-winning photographer.
"At some point I decided to stop the photo. It had upset me so much, I was seeing thousands of deaths every day. "And so I decided to go back to where I was born," he says Salgado. In 1993 he witnessed the Rwandan genocide. That experience was enough to enter a "stop" in a huge career.
The famous photographer together with his wife Lelia decided to go back to Brazil, to live on the estate he inherited from his family and together with his life he would put back on the rails he would try to give life to the Atlantic forest, the second in biodiversity after the Amazon.
30 years ago, this forest, in the state of Minas Gerais, very close to Belo Horizonte and its shores Atlantic, was almost completely destroyed due to human intervention by lumberjacks and hunters.
Salgado was trying to gather his pieces after the experience of Rwanda. The story begins in the late 90s, when Sebastiao inherited the land belonging to his family, a former 1.750-acre farm on which he grew up and owned by his grandfather, Juliano.
"When we got this land, it was less than half a percent rainforest, like the whole surrounding area," he added. "The earth was as sick as I was," Salgado said. But as he added, the idea was his wife's: "Lelia had a great idea, a crazy idea. He said to me: "Why don't we restore the rainforest that existed before? You say you were born in paradise. "Let us build paradise again."
From that day he commented that his and his wife's only goal was reforestation and the ecological salvation of the area. But let's look at the numbers to understand exactly before and after the grandiose venture of Sebastian and Lelia.
In 1999, when the "crazy" plan came to fruition, more than 50% of the local flora had "died". Only 40.000 plants and trees were left. Research a year ago had shown that the Atlantic forest had shrunk to less than 10% of its original size. In order for Salgado and his wife to carry out their plan, they were forced to invest most of their property. Also for the purposes of the project, they set up the "Terra Institute", an environmental organization whose sole purpose would be to revive the biodiversity of the Rio Doce Valley.
In 20 years, 290 species of native trees have been planted, and 172 different species of birds, 33 species of mammals, 15 species of reptiles and 15 amphibians that had left the area have returned to live in the area. Forest in the late 90s.
It is also characteristic that the most important wild mammal in the area, the jaguar, which had moved elsewhere due to the loss of its natural environment, has returned. To date, more than 2.5 million seedlings of endemic species of the Atlantic forest have been planted.
Salgado has said in interviews that "in order to build the development and the economy of our homeland, we destroyed it." The plan of him and his wife not only resulted in the rebirth of a forest of rare beauty from his ashes but also in the development of the whole area of the valley in a complete and healthy way.
Check out this Instagram post.
Look, what can happen in just 12 years! Instituto Terra showed us what is possible. What do you think, can we save our rainforest and keep it this green too? It's up to you. ???? #BeATreeCoiner #TreeCoin #InstitutoTerra #Brasilia #Paraguay
"I was born in 1944 in Brazil inside a farm, most of which was a rainforest. An amazing place. I lived with amazing birds and animals. I swam in rivers with caiman. About 35 families lived on that estate and we consumed everything we produced. Very few things went to market. Once a year, the only product that reached the market was the cattle we produced. "We traveled about 45 days to get to the slaughterhouse and 20 days to get back to the farm," Salgado said.
"As we destroyed Brazil, so did the United States and India, all over the world. To build growth, we come to a huge contradiction by destroying everything around us. "This farm that had thousands of cattle now had a few hundred and we did not know how to deal with it."
Explaining how he did it, he added that "so I went to see a good friend who regenerated forests to make a plan for us and we started. We started planting and in the first year we lost a lot of trees, in the second less, and little by little, this dead land began to regenerate.
We started planting hundreds of thousands of trees, only local species, indigenous, to create an ecosystem similar to the one that was destroyed. And life came back in a wonderful way. It was necessary for us to turn our land into a national park. We transformed it. We gave the earth back to nature ".
Now the institute set up by the Saglkado couple is the largest employer in the area as 2,5 million trees have already been planted. A project that needs hands as after creation and birth comes evolution. And for a place like that, the important thing is to preserve the wildlife.