In 1998, award-winning photojournalist Sebastião Salgado and his wife, Lélia Deluiz Wanick Salgado, founded their nonprofit nature preserve, Instituto Terra.
Over the course of 20 years, the pair was responsible for planting over 2.5 million trees.
It all started when Salgado returned from an assignment covering the Rwandan genocide. He and Lélia inherited his father’s cattle ranch, which was extremely degraded.
“The land was as sick as I was — everything was destroyed,” Salgado said at a Paris climate change meeting in 2015, according to The Guardian.
“Then my wife had a fabulous idea to replant this forest. And when we began to do that, then all the insects and birds and fish returned and, thanks to this increase of the trees I, too, was reborn – this was the most important moment.”
Starting with an initial donation of 100,000 seedlings from a local mining company, they began the first steps of rebuilding.
Now, the 1,750-acre property in the Doce River Valley region in Southeast Brazil is so covered in trees that it can be seen from space.
It was a work of community, love, and dedication.
“Like to grow a baby, you need to teach it to walk, to speak, and then they can go to school on their own,” Salgado told Smithsonian Magazine in 2015. “Trees are the same. You need to hold them close for a while.”
In 2025, Sebastião Salgado passed away, but Lélia and a large team of committed ecologists continue to run Instituto Terra, which now serves as a hub for environmental education, seedling cultivation, and ecological research.
“In 2025, we bid farewell to Sebastião Salgado, our founder, mentor, and inspiration. His legacy lives on in the land he helped restore, in the people he touched with his vision, and in the seeds of the future we continue to plant,” a statement on the organization’s website reads.
“Amidst the pain of loss, we renew our commitment to the values he taught us: caring for nature, believing in people, and dreaming of a more just and sustainable world. We will move forward, together, with gratitude and purpose.”
But none of it would be what it is without the love the Salgados share — and the leap of faith they took together.
As Sebastião told Smithsonian Magazine a decade before his death: “It’s very hard to know where she ends and I begin.”
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A version of this article was originally published in The 2025 Relationships Edition of the Goodnewspaper.
Header image by Luiz Maximiano / Instituto Terra
