{"id":615653,"date":"2026-09-05T21:18:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-05T21:18:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/615653\/"},"modified":"2026-09-05T21:18:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-05T21:18:09","slug":"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-retur","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/615653\/","title":{"rendered":"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."},"content":{"rendered":"

When Sebasti\u00e3o Salgado inherited his family\u2019s cattle ranch near Aimor\u00e9s, in Brazil\u2019s 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<\/a>, \u201cThe land was as sick as I was \u2013 everything was destroyed. Only about 0.5% of the land was covered in trees.\u201d<\/p>\n

That half a percent is where this story begins. What sits on the same ground now is a working forest with birds in it.<\/p>\n

The decision in 1998<\/p>\n

The turn came from both him and his wife, the designer L\u00e9lia Deluiz Wanick Salgado. In April 1998 the couple founded Instituto Terra<\/a>, a non-profit built around one plain idea: put the Atlantic Forest back on the family\u2019s ruined ranch, Fazenda Bulc\u00e3o. They had the land declared a Private Natural Heritage Reserve, a status not usually given to wrecked ground. The reserve covers 608 hectares<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Atlantic Forest matters here beyond one family\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

What planting a forest actually looks like<\/p>\n

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\u2019t. A fauna survey completed in 2006 found 172 bird species already living in the restored forest<\/a>. By early 2019 the reserve had received over 2.5 million seedlings<\/a> of nearly 300 native species.<\/p>\n

Salgado was insistent that the trees had to be local, and his reasoning was ecological rather than sentimental. \u201cYou need forest with native trees,\u201d he argued,<\/a> \u201cand you need to gather the seeds in the same region you plant them or the serpents and the termites won\u2019t come.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

He talked about the seedlings as things that needed raising, not just installing. In his analogy<\/a>: \u201cLike 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.\u201d The work also brought back the water. More than 2,000 springs on and around the property have since been revived<\/a>, which is a plainer way of saying the land holds rain again.<\/p>\n

What we take from it<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Salgado framed the whole effort as proof of a bigger possibility. \u201cWe can rebuild the planet that we destroyed, and we must,\u201d he said<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

Salgado died in Paris on 23 May 2025<\/a>, aged 81. L\u00e9lia and the institute\u2019s team carry the work on. When it announced his death, Instituto Terra said<\/a> he was \u201cmuch more than one of the greatest photographers of our time,\u201d and that \u201chis life\u201d showed \u201cthe power of transformative action.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Sebasti\u00e3o Salgado inherited his family\u2019s cattle ranch near Aimor\u00e9s, in Brazil\u2019s Rio Doce Valley, the land was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":615654,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[246,61,60,82],"class_list":["post-615653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=615653"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615653\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/615654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=615653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=615653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=615653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}