Oct 7, 2026 · 4 min · 5 segments
A Brazilian photographer, Sabastião Salgado, returned to his family‘s farm devastated after photographing the Rwandan genocide. He and his wife planted a forest, transforming the land and his spirit…
After photographing the genocide in Rwanda, a Brazilian photographer named Sebastiao Salgado returned to his family's seventeen hundred acre farm emotionally devastated.
Over the next year, with students, workers, and partners helping, they began planting native trees.
But a seedling isn't a forest, and early on, the work can look nothing like the thing you're trying to build.
If you judge the whole project by what you see at the beginning, you can miss what it's becoming.
In his nineteen sixty-five book, Libraries of the Future, J.C.R. Lichliter quoted a maxim, "People tend to overestimate what can be done in one year and to underestimate what can be done in five or ten years." They didn't judge it by the beginning.
That's the equivalent of about two hundred and seventy-four trees a day, averaged over two decades.
More than a hundred and seventy species of birds, along with mammals, reptiles, and amphibians.
In Salgado's words, "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." You don't plant a forest.
Whatever you're building that still looks like dirt, go plant today's tree anyway, and another one tomorrow and the day after that.
After photographing the genocide in Rwanda, a Brazilian photographer named Sebastiao Salgado returned to his family's seventeen hundred acre farm emotionally devastated.
Over the next year, with students, workers, and partners helping, they began planting native trees.
But a seedling isn't a forest, and early on, the work can look nothing like the thing you're trying to build.
If you judge the whole project by what you see at the beginning, you can miss what it's becoming.
In his nineteen sixty-five book, Libraries of the Future, J.C.R. Lichliter quoted a maxim, "People tend to overestimate what can be done in one year and to underestimate what can be done in five or ten years." They didn't judge it by the beginning.
That's the equivalent of about two hundred and seventy-four trees a day, averaged over two decades.
More than a hundred and seventy species of birds, along with mammals, reptiles, and amphibians.
In Salgado's words, "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." You don't plant a forest.
Whatever you're building that still looks like dirt, go plant today's tree anyway, and another one tomorrow and the day after that.
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