There it was in stark black and white, the sad news that legendary Brazilian photographer Sebasti\u00e3o Salgado had died at the age of 81 in Paris. It is terrible news but the great man lived a full life travelling to the remotest corners of the world to document the lives of people, the environment and the relationship between the two.<\/p>\n
Sometimes brutal but always beautiful, his images of human suffering led some to call him the \u201caesthete of misery\u201d. Probably his most well-known image is the one of hundreds of workers at the Serra Pelada gold mine in Brazil swarming up crude wooden ladders weighed down by heavy containers.<\/p>\n
But there are thousands of other equally unforgettable images \u2014 always black and white and often with the contrasts of light accentuated \u2014 from Salgado\u2019s trips to the wildest areas on Earth, from the Amazon to the Arctic.<\/p>\n
In the documentary The Salt of the Earth, co-produced by German director Wim Wenders and Salgado\u2019s son Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, the acclaimed photographer, a man after my own heart, says: \u201cWe humans are terrible animals.\u201d<\/p>\n
Something that I didn\u2019t know about Salgado is that after experiencing the horrors of the Rwandan genocide, in 1998 he put aside his cameras and founded the Instituto Terra. In a grand reforesting project he planted hundreds of thousands of trees in the Rio Doce valley in Brazil.<\/p>\n
Amid the relentless barrage of stories about the forests being chopped down, or cleared to make room for planting, or just burnt in raging fires caused by climate change, these projects offer a glimmer of hope. And the sheer numbers of the trees planted are truly awe-inspiring.<\/p>\n
India has an impressive number of inspiring characters who are leading the way in reforestation projects. Jaggi Vasudev, more commonly referred to as Sadhguru, founder of the Isha Foundation, says his ambition is to plant 2.4 billion trees. And with his gleaming white turban and flowing white beard the yogi, mystic, teacher and author has the gravitas to convince even the doubters that this ambitious plan is completely achievable.<\/p>\n
Here in Johannesburg we are constantly told we live in \u201cthe biggest man-made forest in the world\u201d with more than 10 million trees growing in the city. <\/p>\n
But Johannesburg is in danger of losing its place as the leading tree destination in the world, because our trees are not immune to the city\u2019s dangerously high crime rate. As yet the trees don\u2019t have a category in the crime stats, but if the rate of attrition continues to climb, the police commissioner will be reeling off some depressing figures of deaths, damage and murders.<\/p>\n
The biggest culprit is the aptly named shot hole borer, also known as PSHB (the P stands for polyphagous, which means the beetle can feed on multiple types of trees). <\/p>\n
Here is an expert definition of this criminal\u2019s modus operandi: \u201cThe beetle infests trees by tunnelling deep into the trunk or branches and depositing a fungus that effectively poisons \u2014 and eventually kills \u2014 the tree. If the tree is a PSHB \u2018reproductive host\u2019 species, then the borer will reproduce in the tree at an alarming rate: a reproductive host tree can house up to 100 000 borer beetles. The offspring then fly out of the host tree and infest more trees.\u201d<\/p>\n
Evidence of this habitual criminal\u2019s killing spree can be seen all over Johannesburg. Bare, blackened tree skeletons with rotting branches.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately the lethal little bug is not the only criminal attacking our trees. Humans won\u2019t let a two-millimetre sized insect from Vietnam outdo them when it comes to murdering trees.<\/p>\n
I have seen jacaranda trees viciously attacked by chainsaw-wielding suburbanites because they are unhappy with the \u201cmess\u201d from the leaves and the beautiful mauve blossoms when they fall.<\/p>\n
I have seen a majestic plane tree in Bez Valley ruthlessly sawn down at ground level because a homeowner had opened a hair salon in his garage and didn\u2019t want the tree to impede the entrance.<\/p>\n
I have seen massive oak trees subjected to hideously slow deaths by criminals who set fire to piles of the trees\u2019 own leaves at the base of the trunk. <\/p>\n
These are trees that are on the pavement and supposedly belong to the city, but much like the smash-and-grabbers at traffic lights or armed hijackers who drive off with your car, not many of the tree killers are brought to justice. <\/p>\n
The problem here might be that all of the trees mentioned are what is politely termed \u201cexotics\u201d brought in from Europe and South America to line the streets of the first suburbs of the rapidly expanding city. Some, like the jacaranda, adapted so well to their new home and reproduced so abundantly that they have been declared \u201calien invasive plants guzzling up all the town\u2019s water and are harmful to the environment and surrounding species\u201d.<\/p>\n
Sounds familiar doesn\u2019t it? <\/p>\n
Even by today\u2019s standards the tree situation cannot be called a genocide but Sebasti\u00e3o Salgado would surely have found inspiration here for his searing photographs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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