An old man has reportedly spent as many as 40 years just trying to bring a forest back to life again.
Antonio Vicente
83-year-old Antonio Vicente has spent the last four decades of his life fighting against the current.
As Brazilian landowners cut down rainforests to make room for
profitable plantations and cattle grazing grounds, he struggled to bring
the lush jungles of his childhood back to life. Today, his efforts are
being rewarded, as the completely stripped land he once began planting
trees on 40 years ago, has become a beautiful jungle teeming with
tropical wildlife once again.
It was 1973 when Antonio took up the challenge of restoring the
forest on a 31-hectare piece of land that had been razed for cattle
grazing.
Ironically enough, he bought the land on the outskirts of Sao
Pablo, in Brazil’s Sao Paulo region, using credits that the military
government was giving out to promote deforestation and investing in
advanced agricultural technology. But Antonio had no intention of using
the money to boost the national agriculture. He just wanted to revive
the forest.
“You are dumb. Planting trees is a waste of land. You won’t
have income. If it’s full of trees, you won’t have room for cows or
crops,” Antonio’s neighbors, who were all cattle and dairy farmers, used to tell him.
But he knew that the damage caused by deforestation was far greater than any financial profit, so he paid them no heed.
Vicente had grown up on a rural farm, and had watched his father
and the other villagers cut down neighboring forests at the owners’
orders, either for charcoal production or just to clear land for grazing
cattle. He had watched the ancient water sources dry up and people
struggling to survive.
“When I was a child, the peasants cut down the trees to make
grasslands and charcoal, and the water dried up and did not come back,” he told the BBC. “I
thought: ‘Water is valuable, no one makes water, and the population
will not stop growing. What is going to happen? We are going to run out
of water.'”
With only some donkeys and a small team of hired workers Antonio
Vicente set about bring back the forest to his land. What started out as
a weekend hobby soon became a permanent way of life, and Antonio
recalls often spending whole days and nights in his young jungle,
surrounded by rats and foxes, and eating banana sandwiches for
breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Over the last 40 years, he has planted an estimated 50,000 trees on
his 31-hectare land, which now make up a small oasis of rainforest, and
a sanctuary for wildlife.
As the forest grew, the water returned, and Antonio says that there
are now over 20 water sources on his land that were no longer there
when he bought it. Then the animals started making a home there.
Today, the forest is alive with the sounds of birds and insects living there, and more species are settling in every year.
“There are toucans, all kinds of birds, a great rodent called
apaca, squirrels, lizards, opossums, and even the boars are returning,” Vicente says. “If you ask me who my family are, I would say all this right here, each one of these that I planted from a seed,” 83-year-old Antonio told The Guardian.
As impressive as Antonio Vicente’s life-long dedication to
reforestation is, his is a very rare story. Data shows that nearly 8,000
hectares (19,770 acres) of Brazilian rainforest were destroyed between
August 2015 and July 2016.
That makes Antonio’s 31 hectares seem like a drop in a pond, but
just imagine if we had more people like him, who cared more about water
and clean air than money.
“If everyone followed Vicente’s example, our task would be a lot easier,” says Rodrigo Medeiros, vice president of Conservation International Brazil.
"The scale of restoration that we are dealing with here is
unprecedented in the history of Brazil. Without forests, water, food and
a pleasant climate are basically not possible.”
Via Oddity Central
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