Under the volcanoes


Sebastião Salgado first went to Rwanda in 1971. He was a young economist at the time, helping local communities develop their own tea and coffee plantations. He returned in 1991, by then a celebrated photographer, and was astonished by the transformation. "Oh boy! The tea plantation was the most beautiful plantation in the world." Rwanda was beginning to enjoy its wealth, and the plantation workers were learning how to work the land for their own benefit.

In 1994 and 1995, Salgado returned again. This time he was horrified by the transformation. Civil war had ravaged the land, and Hutu extremists had killed 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu moderates in a three-month genocide. The plantation had been burnt down, and families who'd worked on it had moved to Congo or been hacked to death. He saw the most terrible carnage and desolation. The fertile, prospering nation had become a sterile wasteland, a cemetery more than a country.

Now he has returned again, as part of Genesis, his eight-year project in conjunction with the UN, Unesco, Unep (United Nations environment project) and the Guardian, in which he is exploring the world's purest and most protected areas, to remind us of what we still have and what we are in danger of losing.

This is the second chapter in Genesis - the first visited the virgin territory of the Galápagos. Salgado took himself off to the Virunga national park, which straddles Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and which is the homeland of the only mountain gorillas in the world. All three countries have experienced unspeakable atrocities in recent years: civil war, famine, Aids epidemics. An estimated three million people have been killed in Congo's civil war, while a 2004 survey in Uganda suggested that 17% of the adult population is HIV positive (more than four times the official rate).

Now the Virunga national park is suffering the fallout from war. Mountain gorillas are in danger of extinction (although the most recent census showed a slight increase in numbers, there are still fewer than 700 worldwide) and the flora is less abundant as more and more people exploit the land. The gorillas have been persecuted by trappers, bandits and farmers, and endangered by volcanoes.

Yet, while Congo remains hellish and Uganda impoverished, Salgado finds hope in Rwanda. Perhaps the volcanoes are a metaphor for the country itself: from the merciless destruction, the terrible beauty of the lava, bursts forth new life. Over the past decade Rwanda has begun to put itself together again - the Tutsi government preaches justice and reconciliation, Hutu and Tutsi are again living side by side, and Hutu killers confess their sins at gacaca, local trials in which the community passes judgment.

Eight volcanoes form the backdrop to the national park. They range in age from 100,000 to 500,000 years old and rise to 4,500m. Six of them are extinct. In 2002, Nyiragongo erupted and destroyed 70% of the town of Goma in Congo. When Salgado was there earlier this year, the other live volcano, Nyamulagira, erupted. He was astonished by what he saw and felt.

"Just think, when we normally walk over rocks, they are millions of years old, and I stepped on rocks formed from the volcano that were two days old. It was incredible. As soon as I took a photograph, I had to step back. If I stayed on the same rock too long, the sole of my shoe stuck to it and I smelled the rubber burning. I was four or five metres from the lava. I could feel my skin burning."

One photograph shows the volcano's trail of destruction. It looks like a scene from a death camp. But the mutilated remains are not human: they are the hollowed-out stumps of banana trees, the trunks melted under temperatures of up to 1,260C. Lava dances down the mountain like streaks of lightning, turning the forest into a desert of ash. In some pictures we seem to be back at the beginning of time, the world reduced to rock and rubble. Others are misty and magical. Then, out of nowhere,orchids and giant lobelia bloom and gravity-defying trees scale the mountains.

Salgado is talking faster and faster - urgent, infectious, desperate to communicate his enthusiasm for the planet. "You can't help but meditate and think about evolution. Oh boy! When you think of all the life that comes from these volcanoes. For me, this is the dialectic of life - the destruction and the creation that comes from it. This is how we fuel our planet."

He says that everything is so new to him. He is using a new camera (a Pentax 645, which gives him negatives three times the normal size) to shoot new subjects, which he is seeing with new eyes. "I feel so peaceful," he says, "so optimistic. I feel that I am part of nature again."

Are animals more difficult to photograph than people? "No, it is the same thing."

What is that thing? "It is about having enough time to show them respect, forging a relationship, and learning what is happening in front of you in order to integrate. In the end, I am just one more animal in front of another group of animals."

Salgado spent a month with the gorillas in Uganda and Rwanda. Before the civil war in Rwanda, the mountain gorillas were a big tourist attraction, and are becoming so again. In Uganda, gorillas are not so used to human company. Salgado was one of the first non-scientists to visit them.

Some gorillas were suspicious of Salgado and his camera, others took to them gladly. Many of the pictures show the gorillas enjoying domestic life - a mother rolls on her back ecstatically, eyes shut, as her baby nuzzles at her breast; a silverback, the leader of his clan, cradles his youngest; families hang out together; a young female looks bewildered and confused, like an elderly granny.

At times, they look human - one gorilla stares straight into the camera as he picks his teeth, another cups his chin in his foot in philosophical mode (it could be a picture byline on a broadsheet Comment page), yet another does a Jesus impression, camouflaged in the bushes and apparently wearing a crown of thorns. "What was so amazing was the love they had for each other - their respect and loyalty," says Salgado.

As the volcanoes took him back along the evolutionary trail, so did the gorillas. He looked at them and saw his fellow man, and as they looked at him, he wondered if they saw their fellow gorilla. In a strange way, they made him feel hopeful about humankind. The gorillas have great qualities - qualities that human beings share with them, along with 96% of our DNA.

Salgado felt proud that, at our best, we have the same capacity for love and tenderness as these gorillas. They put our potential into context for him, and showed him our shortcomings. "The problem is, we live in a society where all that interests us is power and money. So we don't have any interest in our children and what we leave for our children is not important. It is important what you eat now, what you do now. If we were interested in a sustainable planet where other generations have a right to a decent future, we would not live like this."

Salgado says that he always had to keep his distance from the gorillas. Are they violent? No, he says, they are veggie-eating, love, peace and understanding types, even if they do like to make the occasional charge. "I couldn't go too close, because the gorillas are vulnerable to catching infections from us. If I have a cold, I may pass it on."

Again, Salgado stresses how rare these gorillas are. In recent years, they have been preyed on by poachers, eager to sell them to zoos or to flog their hands and feet for ashtrays. In order to take a child from its parents, gorillaknappers have to kill the parents first. Last year, three poachers were jailed for four years for killing two mountain gorillas and stealing their baby. In 2001, Rwandan soldiers were deployed across the Virunga national park after militiamen shot, cooked and ate two silverbacks.

Salgado, who is Brazilian, is almost a year into Genesis. Is it making him misanthropic? Would he rather spend his time with gorillas than humans these days? He laughs. "No, it just makes me aware how special mankind is. But also how close we are to the rest of the animal world." It's taken him a lifetime to realise this, but you don't need to travel thousands of miles, as he has, to become enlightened. He tells me to look out of the nearest window, and take in the brilliance of all the living things I can see.