A Brazilian couple took over a badly degraded former cattle farm and in 1998 founded an organisation to restore its Atlantic Forest; the first survey, in 2006, found 172 bird species had already returned to the recovering forest.
When Sebastião Salgado inherited his family’s cattle ranch near Aimorés, in Brazil’s Rio Doce Valley, the land was close to dead. Decades of grazing had stripped it. The soil had washed away, and the hills that were meant to be forest sat bare. Salgado, back from years of photographing famine and war, saw a landscape that matched his own exhaustion. He later said, “The land was as sick as I was – everything was destroyed. Only about 0.5% of the land was covered in trees.”
That half a percent is where this story begins. What sits on the same ground now is a working forest with birds in it.
The decision in 1998
The turn came from both him and his wife, the designer Lélia Deluiz Wanick Salgado. In April 1998 the couple founded Instituto Terra, a non-profit built around one plain idea: put the Atlantic Forest back on the family’s ruined ranch, Fazenda Bulcão. They had the land declared a Private Natural Heritage Reserve, a status not usually given to wrecked ground. The reserve covers 608 hectares.
The Atlantic Forest matters here beyond one family’s land. It is one of the most cleared forests in the Americas, and the Rio Doce Valley had lost most of its cover to farming. Restoring a patch of it is not a symbolic gesture on empty ground. It is putting back a specific, local version of something that was almost entirely gone.
What planting a forest actually looks like
Planting began in December 1999, and the method was fussier than dropping seeds in holes. Instituto Terra used native Atlantic Forest seedlings, let the land recover on its own where it could, and added more plants where it couldn’t. A fauna survey completed in 2006 found 172 bird species already living in the restored forest. By early 2019 the reserve had received over 2.5 million seedlings of nearly 300 native species.
Salgado was insistent that the trees had to be local, and his reasoning was ecological rather than sentimental. “You need forest with native trees,” he argued, “and you need to gather the seeds in the same region you plant them or the serpents and the termites won’t come.” A forest of the wrong trees tends not to draw the animals that make a forest work. Get the plants right and the rest of the food chain has a reason to arrive.
He talked about the seedlings as things that needed raising, not just installing. In his analogy: “Like to grow a baby, you need to teach it to walk, to speak, and then they can go to school on their own. Trees are the same. You need to hold them close for a while.” The work also brought back the water. More than 2,000 springs on and around the property have since been revived, which is a plainer way of saying the land holds rain again.
What we take from it
Nobody in 1999 could have promised 172 species. They planted, they waited, they counted, and the counting is the part that gets dropped when the story is retold as a couple who planted a forest and the animals came back. Somebody had to walk the reserve and identify 172 kinds of bird before that sentence was true.
Salgado framed the whole effort as proof of a bigger possibility. “We can rebuild the planet that we destroyed, and we must,” he said. That is his optimism, not a settled fact, and one restored ranch does not undo a continent of clearing. But it is a real place with real birds in it, which is more than most declarations about restoration can claim.
Salgado died in Paris on 23 May 2025, aged 81. Lélia and the institute’s team carry the work on. When it announced his death, Instituto Terra said he was “much more than one of the greatest photographers of our time,” and that “his life” showed “the power of transformative action.”