Prison inmates are helping restore Idaho’s landscape after wildfires. Here’s how.

Inside of a hoop house, tiny sagebrush plants sit inside of black plastic cones.

Lisa Wheeler calls them her babies. Every day during the fall, she spent time meticulously caring for each plant, making sure all 18,000 seedlings had the best chance of survival.

Documenting, watering, thinning, fertilizing and watching for disease became her routine.

“To be in a very quiet setting, it’s almost like a meditation,” Wheeler said. “To be in a serene place, it brought calmness to me and peace to my soul and heart.”

Peace is something that can be hard to find inside of a prison.

Wheeler is serving time at the South Boise Women’s Correctional Center near Kuna for possession of a controlled substance.

It was there she was introduced to the Sagebrush in Prisons Project started by the Institute for Applied Ecology.

“It really is a win-win-win program,” said Stacy Moore, ecological education program coordinator with the Institute for Applied Ecology. “It provides skills for the inmates, it’s a really nice contact with the community and it’s helping to restore our native habitats.”

Mule deer, white-tailed deer, elk, pronghorn antelope and more than 100 bird species depend on sagebrush for food and habitat.

The Idaho State Correctional Center, about a mile from the women’s prison, has participated in the program since 2015. This year, they grew a record 57,600 sagebrush seedlings. Crew sizes range from two to 20 people, depending on the prison and stage of plant growth.

Oregon, Wyoming, California and Nevada also participate in the program.

Before COVID-19, the program offered monthly lectures on the environment and agriculture-related topics. Classes covered everything from solar power and beekeeping to birds of prey and desert plants.

“This is an opportunity, at least for me, to reach a segment of the population that usually isn’t reached with environmental education,” said Holly Hovis, Institute for Applied Ecology program coordinator.

Hovis works directly with the two crews in Idaho and has seen the demand for high-quality programming inside of prisons.

“Everybody is so eager for something productive to do and some education,” she said.

Wheeler owns her own landscaping business that she plans to start up once she is released. This program has provided her with skills that she can use in her business.

The hardest part of the process was watching her seedlings be boxed up and given to the Bureau of Land Management for planting.

“To see them gone, I thought, ‘What am I going to do now?’” she said.

The seedlings from the South Boise Women’s Correctional Center were planted in southwest Idaho to help the landscape recover from the Cat and Soda fires. The seedlings from Idaho State Correctional Center were planted near Shoshone.

“It’s a huge benefit for the folks in the prison system and it benefits us,” said Tony Erickson, supervisory fire management specialist with the BLM’s Twin Falls District. “It helps us get our lands restored quickly.”

Using seedlings can be more effective than planting seeds on smaller restoration projects, Erickson said.

“The seedlings that (the prisons) provide are some of the best that we usually see from all of our other providers,” he said.

For Wheeler, she is proud of what they have accomplished.

“I recommend anybody to have this experience, especially if you get in trouble and find yourself in a place like this,” she said. “It’s a fresh new perspective on the value of life.”