THE FUSE

At five in the morning, in the mist that closes over 126 hectares of newly turned earth an hour from Belo Horizonte, Brazil, an old man in white linen trousers who evokes a visual straight out of Genesis stands among a dozen diggers, watching 20-metre trees lowered into holes. In the country's heartland, where iron ore mines devour the nearby mountains, this is extraction in reverse, regeneration at an industrial scale, at breakneck speed in the service of one man's dedication to beauty.