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Building a home, a community, and a forest.
Last fall Claudia Macedo stood before a group at the Vineyard Haven Library to tell the story of her ambitious rainforest restoration project in Brazil. She began with an apology for being an inexperienced public speaker. Then, like most people passionate about what they do, she came alive, stood tall, and gestured with her hands as she walked us through her slides. The audience was transfixed. The hour flew by. At the end she introduced her husband, Lew French, the storied stonemason artist on the Island, and asked him to fill in some details. The audience hung around after, eager to learn even more about the couple’s life and work in Brazil’s Mata Atlântica.
The Mata Atlântica rainforest hugs Brazil’s coastline and once stretched from the northern to the southern tip of the country, hosting a vast and rich ecosystem teeming with life. Today, less than 12% of the original rainforest remains, 8% of which is contiguous. Most of the land has been cleared for agriculture or logging by locals seeking merely to survive, leaving behind a fragmented and endangered landscape.
It was kismet, or maybe destiny, that Lew and Claudia met on Martha’s Vineyard, and a shared interest in the Mata Atlântica evolved. Now they live much of the year in this remote part of the world.
As a boy, Lew spent summers with his grandparents at their cabin on a lake in northern Minnesota, where he felt at home in nature and working with his hands. In the mid-1980s, his friend David Flanders encouraged him to come to the Vineyard, where, in time, his artistic stonework garnered national attention. His unique relationship to stone is beautifully described in Barbarella and David Fokos’ documentary about Lew: The Power of Stone (available on Amazon). Across the Island and beyond it, outside and inside homes, Lew’s creations have been commissioned as signature focal points, evolved from his meditative vision. “Stone is just waiting for you to reveal it,” he often says.
Claudia was born to a well-to-do family and grew up in the northeast of Brazil in the big city of Salvador, once the capital of Brazil and a hub for slave trade. Claudia, too, experienced a deep sense of happiness during summers in the countryside at her extended family’s farms. She came to the United States for her education in 1991 and moved to the Vineyard in 2006. She worked at the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital as a physical therapist. That’s when she met Lew. They married in 2007.
Nearly three decades ago, before the two got together, Lew had searched for a place to connect more deeply with the Earth and find a slower pace of life. Through a friend, he found the Mata Atlântica, where, in stages as he could afford it, he bought 2,000 acres of a 1940s farm near a town called Bananal in the state of São Paulo. In his book Sticks and Stone: The Designs of Lew French, (with photographer Alison Shaw; available locally and on Amazon), he describes the natural beauty of the place.
“There is water everywhere — in hundreds of waterfalls and springfed rivers, trickling down every leaf and flower petal from dew in the early morning and by way of incredible tropical storms that arrive without warning on the sunniest of days.”
When they planned Claudia’s first visit, Lew feared his bride would be alarmed and find the place unwelcoming. She had grown up in comfort. The mud hut where they would stay before he could build them a house was filled with scorpions, bats, rats, and spiders — some deadly — and had no electricity. At night it was so dark they couldn’t see each other once the candles were out. And they would have to rely on the old wood-burning adobe stove to cook.
Claudia says, “The minute I got there, I fell in love and felt more at home, more myself than anywhere. I felt grounded.”
When I asked them how long it took to build the house, Lew laughed and said “Ten years later and we’re still not done.” He built most of the house himself, sometimes with a few workers, and the photos taken by Alison Shaw for Lew’s book show a beautiful home that is open to the outdoors, yet anchored inside by stone walls and wood beams. And they even have electricity! The challenges were constant though. He writes that they often “had to fix long stretches of washed-out roads by hand in order to get material suppliers to drive their trucks up our mountain. The process was repeated every time there was a downpour.”
Over time Claudia felt more and more at home and connected to the forest around them. When she came down the hill to town, the vast deforested areas and the heat were disquieting to her. She talked to an old-timer who recalled how, as a kid, he needed ropes to cross a nearby rushing river now diminished to a sad trickle of water. She wondered if there was anything she could do to help reverse the damage.
She took time to look, listen, and understand. Lew points out that she had the benefit of knowing how things work in the U.S. and what might be possible, and she also knew how to win the trust of the local people.
She says, “It takes time because people can’t imagine someone helping them without wanting something back. They aren’t used to collaboration or having any power. People are very poor and beaten down. Without resources, they barely sustain themselves and often go hungry. Some live deep in the forest and are forgotten…maybe unknown. To eat, they forage and are ashamed of their situation.”
For inspiration, Claudia visited a woman running a well-known restoration program in Caatinga, another Brazilian region suffering from severe desertification.
Claudia told me, “I drove nine hours with nothing on the roads, and if I broke down, I wouldn’t be found. When I got there, I had never seen such poverty, kids with distended bellies, no shoes, some naked, and they had tears when they saw me, thinking I might help them.”
The area, called Raso da Catarina, located in the state of Bahia, is home to a number of endangered rare blue (or Hyacinth) macaws and is the driest region in Brazil. The restoration project aimed to create buffer zones in a large park and plant native species to provide nourishment to local people and their animals — cows, goats, pigs. Several communities live in the buffer zone, including indigenous tribes (Quilombos, who are descendants of escaped enslaved Africans), fishermen, and several settlements of mostly women living with their children and elderly relatives while their partners work in big cities (and often don’t return).
To help, Claudia procured 150,000 donated native trees, including fruit trees, but she needed to raise funds to transport them and build nurseries, as well as to hire personnel to carry out the reforestation.
The minute I got there, I fell in love and felt more at home, more myself than anywhere. I felt grounded.
– Claudia Macedo
“I called One-Tree Planted (she found them on the internet) and they asked how much we needed. How many trees? 150,000, we told them. How much money? $150,000. And they said okay.” She could hardly believe how easy it was. Her success drew the attention of BBC Earth based on the recommendation of One-Tree Planted. She thought, “I guess I can do this!”
Back home again, Claudia joined neighbors to begin reforesting in their area, planting trees again with help from One-Tree Planted. She recruited locals, including school kids, and even some colleagues from Martha’s Vineyard Hospital came down to help. She began with 2,000 native species and planted 13,000 trees. “There is a lot to do to prepare the land,” she said, “including [applying] a hydrogel to hold the moisture in the dry months. But once you dig a hole and plant a tree, it’s a powerful thing.”
When I talked with Lew and Claudia last November, they told me they were heading back in December to plant 40,000 more trees. “It’s planting season,” they said, “and we have to get back.”
The area of their new reforestation project was affected by wildfires last year. They raised funds to truck saplings from a specific nursery, but not enough to also purchase the materials for planting the saplings. By March, they had planted 5,000 trees, but they will need more financial help to plant and maintain the remaining 35,000. They want to employ local workers and train them so that afterward, they can work for other projects in the region as well.
One recent bump in the road on the project has a silver lining. A supplier sent saplings that were much smaller than they’d expected, and they had to return them. “They would never have survived a week out of the greenhouse,” Claudia said. Trying a new tack, she partnered with the main water and sewage company in the state of Rio de Janeiro, which runs a program called “Replanting Lives.” The program builds nurseries inside penitentiaries and provides inmates with job training and paid work raising native saplings to be used in reforesting degraded areas of importance for water production. “This company stepped in to provide us with the trees we needed to reforest our region. As a way to help their nursery program, we have engaged our community, as well as cities around us, to collect native tree seeds, and we are donating the seeds to the nurseries this company created inside nine penitentiaries.”
She recruited locals, including school kids, and even some colleagues from the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital came down to help. She began with 2,000 native species and planted 13,000 trees, and headed back in December to plant 40,000 more.
But Claudia’s vision for her area is even more expansive. In her view, as long as people are hungry, dispirited and poor, they won’t see the value of protecting the trees.
She has won the trust of teachers and brought environmental experts into classrooms to inspire the young. She takes young kids into the field to help plant trees and develop in them a pride about where they live. She works with families to show them how to plant their own vegetable gardens and sell their extras, if they have them: “When it works, people don’t go hungry.”
She’s become a familiar figure in town, where she gives away plants at the outdoor market — mostly Atlantic Rainforest species, meant for reforestation — and encourages people to donate back seedlings to create their own vegetable gardens. She hopes to set up a permanent place in town with plants for the locals, and the town mayor may be donating land for her project. “As part of the plan to create community enthusiasm for planting in general,” she said, “I created a project through my nonprofit where hundreds of flower plants, orchard, and vegetable garden plants are donated as well. My husband and I spend three to four months planting cuttings of our own garden plants in order to plant them during giveaway events. And using financial donations from family and friends, we buy seedlings for vegetable gardens at farms nearby, and donate them as well.”
She works closely with the local Ecological Station and hopes to attract researchers and students from international universities around the world to come study and work on the restoration.
The town’s modest economy relies on women’s crochet work, but their designs are old-fashioned. Claudia has recruited a designer from Rio to teach them how to extract fibers from the jungle and crochet modern designs. They have a new style they suggested to the artisans — introducing forest themes into their pieces, and they’ll showcase their work in September during their first ecological festival. She envisions a market for their work overseas, perhaps even in Paris.
Margaret Mead’s familiar quote seems apt: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”
In the case of Lew and Claudia, their “world” is the Mata Atlântica, one of the planet’s many exquisite rainforest canopies vital to the earth’s survival.
Claudia has left her job at the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital to work fulltime on the project and her nonprofit, IBIOS – Instituto Biosfera. “As much as I have enjoyed helping people with their health in a hospital setting, I feel that I can contribute further by helping rebuild the forest here in Brazil.”
What You Can Do
Donate: Claudia and Lew have created a page for their reforestation project with GlobalGiving, an international nonprofit that assists other nonprofits around the world by making it possible for donations to be tax deductible. “Soon we will be writing other projects for different agendas, such as building vegetable gardens for impoverished families. The main thing now is to find a grant for seed money, so we can hire office help in order to assist us looking for grants and writing projects. Here’s where to donate.
For more options, contact Claudia at [email protected]
Check out their Instagram: @ibios_instituto_biosfera
