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