Nevada inmates raise plants to prevent wildfires

CARSON CITY, Nev. (KOLO) – There’s a project underway to prevent wildfires in Nevada. But what makes it different is that most of the work is done by inmates. The effort is working both against fires and for the inmates.

Nevada is no stranger to wildfires. As they ravage backyards, it threatens lives, homes and plants like sagebrush.

Scott Kelley with the Nevada Department of Corrections explained, “Wildfires are happening more often and wildfires are more intense. And if they don’t get sagebrush out and plant it in these areas, those areas can be overrun by cheat grass and other more flammable things.”

So behind the wired fences of the Warm Springs Correctional Center in Carson City, sagebrush grows. For seven days a week and most of the year, about a dozen prisoners raise thousands of plants.

Inmate Patrick McKinnon has been part of the program for a year. He said, “I’ve never cultured plants like this before. So, as a team, we’ve all gone through a huge learning curve.”

From seed to planting stage, McKinnon and others tend to them under Shannon Swim with the Institute of Applied Ecology.

“Sagebrush is a keystone species,” Swim said. “It essentially holds this whole ecosystem together. Without the sagebrush, the whole system kind of falls apart.”

And after months of tending, Swim explained, “They water them, they thin them down to one container, they sing to them.”

The BLM plants them in burn-scarred areas. Swim said, “We’ve had anywhere from 40 percent to 90 percent survival rates where specifically in northern Nevada and the Great Basin is really high.”

But it’s not just the growth of sagebrush that gets swim excited but the growth of the inmates too. “It makes a different in these guy’s lives and really helps them contribute to something positive,” Swim said.

And McKinnon agrees. “Just putting 20 people from all different parts and different backgrounds together and be able to make a cohesive team to work on this,” he said.

Inmates have helped raise more than 200,000 sage plants this year alone.

State officials now plan to expand the project to other prisons in Nevada.

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