Ambassador Stefano Pontecorvo supports greener Earth
Newswire
Rome: Senior Italian diplomat Ambassador Stefano Pontecorvo this week supported efforts to make the planet Earth greener.
“An excellent way to spend money, rather than throwing billions in expensive hobbies,” he tweeted, quoting a story about a Brazilian couple who planted about 2.7 million trees in 20 years to restore forest that had been wiped out by deforestation.
Brazilian photojournalist Sebastião Ribeiro Salgado and his wife Lélia Deluiz Wanick Salgado have spent the last 20 years planting an 1,750-acre forest to transform a barren plot of land in Brazil’s Minas Gerais state into a tropical paradise.
Even animals have returned including more than 30 species of mammals, 170 species of birds and 15 species of amphibians and reptiles.
When Salgado returned from a traumatic trip covering the Rwandan genocide in 1994, he was shocked to find his family’s former cattle ranch in a state of natural degradation.
‘The land was as sick as I was – everything was destroyed,’ the famed photographer said at a meeting on climate change in Paris in 2015. ‘Only about 0.5% of the land was covered in trees.’
Salgado, now 75, remembered the farm he grew up on as a lush and lively sub-tropical rainforest, but the area had suffered from rampant deforestation and uncontrolled exploitation of natural resources. His wife had the idea to replant the forest.
‘It was so natural, instinctive. The land was so degraded, so horrible. What a bad gift! Why not plant?’ Lélia told Smithsonian Magazine in 2015.
So the award-winning photographer known for his black-and-white depictions of human suffering around the world turned his hand to healing the land of his youth.
In 1998, the couple founded the Instituto Terra, an environmental organization dedicated to the sustainable development of the valley.
They elicited the support of Vale, one of the world’s biggest mining companies and reforestation experts, which donated 100,000 seedlings from its nursery and helped rejuvenate the ‘dead soil’.
Water once again flows in once dried-up creeks. Water had vanished from the area but the reforestation brought it back
Animals have returned to the area in abundance, including more than 30 species of mammals such as this anteater. The turtle is one of the 15 species of amphibians and reptiles that have returned
The Salgados no longer own the property, which is now a federally recognized nature preserve that raises millions of tree seedlings in its nursery, trains young ecologists and welcomes visitors to see a forest reborn.
