Sebastião Salgado: “Humankind faces an existential crisis”

The dramatic changes caused by humans on the planet, which have led to the destruction of natural environments and primitive civilizations, can lead humankind itself to a point of no return, according to Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado. He received a Personality Award from the French-Brazilian Chamber of Commerce in Rio de Janeiro on Thursday night (Oct. 27) for his artistic, humanitarian, and socio-environmental contributions.

Salgado, who has a degree in Economics, has traveled all the Earth's continents since 1973, when he began his photography career after a trip to Africa. The author of several photography books, which resulted from projects he carried out over the years—including Workers, Terra: Struggle of the Landless, Other Americas, Migrations (also published under the title Exodus), and Genesis—a far from optimistic outlook on the actions of modern civilization on the planet, which he says is on the brink of exhaustion.

Existential crisis

“I think that our species is living completely disconnected from reality. From a certain point, we began to destroy and plunder our world. We are using up much more than our planet can provide. We're moving toward a dead end. Our planet can't afford all this.”

According to him, the destruction of natural environments and the social hardship, with the escalation of warfare between countries and internal conflicts that kill thousands of people, are symptoms of a bigger crisis.

“It's not a crisis of capitalism. It's much more than that. It's the existential crisis of a species. We'll have to reflect critically on our whole way of life, our consumption habits, our behavior, and our relationships. I do hope for the planet, but I doubt if humankind will survive. We are headed to crash against a wall. This is a global crisis.”

Salgado said that the current generation will have a price to pay in the future for all the damage it is causing to the planet.

“In order to build this modern society, we have left a desert behind. We have the obligation to keep what we have intact. We no longer need to destroy. We have a lot of cleared land in Brazil we don't use. We're using one-third of the land that we have cleared, and abandoned the rest.”

Instituto Terra

Salgado became involved with the environmental cause when he took over a totally degraded farm of his family's in Aimorés, Minas Gerais, and replanted the 700-hectare area. This gave new life to dried-out springs, and brought back some of the wild animals there. The experience gave rise to Instituto Terra, focused on protecting the environment.

Not far from there, a year ago, the country saw its biggest environmental disaster caused by the collapse of a tailings dam that belonged to Samarco mining company, which swept through the Bento Ribeiro district devastating everything on its way and leaving 21 people dead. Salgado said that the important thing to do now is to ensure that fines and compensations are enforced in the region.

“The money from the fines doesn't go into [restoring] the environment. It goes to the public coffers to help pay off the government deficit, and it's never going to return to the region again. A year ago we proposed the creation of a fund to restore the area. We have to compensate and rebuild impacted areas, restore all water springs, the riparian vegetation, the sewage system. It's a long-term problem. In order to recover the Doce river, we must plant near 370,000 springs. At the moment, the fund is only enough for 500 springs.”

Amazon

Today, at 72, Salgado is involved in a new photographic project about the Amazon. He had said this would be his last project, but now he is considering working on further projects for a few more years.

“Now I can see that my project on indigenous communities, which should take me some three or four years to complete, isn't the last one. Photographers do not have an occupation. They have a way of living. When I go out to take photographs, I'm a completely free man, in full connection with my planet.”

For young photographers who are making a start on their careers, he makes only one suggestion: “I'd advise these photographers to go to college, study a bit of sociology, anthropology, geography, economics, geopolitics, so they get a grip on the society they live in, so they know how to photograph what's essential and serve as mirrors of society.”

Translated by Mayra Borges