The fire season, explained

Every dry season, fire moves across La Mosquitia. To understand the project, it helps to understand why.

People set fires for reasons that make sense up close: to clear land for planting, to flush game while hunting, to green up pasture. But in a landscape of Caribbean pine savanna, fire that returns year after year never lets young trees survive. The result, over decades, is grassland where forest used to be.

How the brigades change it

The work is not about blaming anyone. It is about offering an alternative: firebreaks cut before the season, brigades that patrol and respond, and paid roles that make protecting the land more valuable than burning it. Where this is in place, the fires are largely stopped — and the forest comes back on its own.

“Stop the fire for a few years, and the land does the rest.”

The fire season still comes. What changes is what it leaves behind.