<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<!-- saved from url=(0064)http://fsweb.wo.fs.fed.us/pao/news/clips/2004/11nov04/113004.htm -->
<HTML><HEAD><TITLE>Centennial forest fest is planned, Union Democrat, 11/26/04</TITLE>
<STYLE>TD {
FONT-FAMILY: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif
}
TD {
FONT-SIZE: 10pt
}
.NewsHeadline {
FONT-WEIGHT: bold; FONT-SIZE: 15pt; COLOR: #31319c
}
.NewsBodyCopy2 {
FONT-SIZE: 9pt
}
.print {
COLOR: #000000; BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffff
}
.print-normal {
FONT-WEIGHT: normal; FONT-SIZE: 11px; COLOR: #000000; FONT-FAMILY: Tahoma, Verdana, sans-serif; BACKGROUND-COLOR: transparent; TEXT-DECORATION: none
}
.Story {
PADDING-RIGHT: 10px; PADDING-LEFT: 10px
}
.Headline {
FONT: bold 12px/18px Verdana; TEXT-DECORATION: none
}
.Story .Headline {
MARGIN-TOP: 10px; MARGIN-BOTTOM: 10px; FONT: bold 19px/19px verdana; COLOR: #000000
}
.Story .SubHead {
MARGIN-BOTTOM: 10px; FONT: bold 15px/14px verdana
}
.Story .StoryBody {
FONT-SIZE: 12px; LINE-HEIGHT: 14px; FONT-FAMILY: verdana
}
.Story .Dateline {
FONT-WEIGHT: bold
}
</STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<P><FONT face="Times New Roman">November 30, 2004 New York Times</FONT></P>
<P><B><FONT size="4" face="Times New Roman">Moss Hunters Roll Away Nature's
Carpet, and Some Ecologists Worry</FONT></B></P>
<P><FONT face="Times New Roman">By Joshua Tompkins<BR><BR>While a rolling stone
may gather no moss, what Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer wants to know is how quickly a
stationary stone can collect it. Specifically, how quickly moss, when stripped
from boulders or tree trunks or the forest floor, will grow back.<BR><BR>Dr.
Kimmerer, a professor of environmental and forest biology at the State
University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, is one of
a growing number of researchers and land managers who are worried about the
effect of commercial moss gathering.<BR><BR>She has seen the aftermath of such
gathering firsthand, having once bushwhacked her way up a muddy hillside in
western Oregon, following the trail of harvesters to a grove of maple trees
hiding in the mist.<BR><BR>Winded by the climb and bloody from thorn scrapes,
she took in the scene, described last year in her book "Gathering Moss." On the
far side of a stream, the trees were swaddled in moss, its lush fabric wrapped
around the trunks in woolly pelts and hanging from the branches like green
gossamer beards.<BR><BR>But on her side of the water, the maples were
bare. Their moss had been torn off, stuffed into burlap sacks, and hauled
back down the hill. Frowning at a cigarette package left by one of the
harvesters, Dr. Kimmerer marveled at how they had gotten their heavy prize
through the salmonberry bramble and wondered if they knew what they had
plundered. "What it was, of course, is a living carpet that might have been a
hundred years old," she said recently in a telephone interview.<BR><BR>Her
frustration stresses the contradictory relationship humans have with moss, an
ancient, primitive plant whose role in forest ecology is still<BR>just partly
understood. Overlooked in its habitat - or even mistaken for a blight - moss is
nevertheless sought for its aesthetic value at nurseries, craft stores and
floral shops around the country, lining baskets and adorning
wreaths.<BR><BR>With gatherers roaming public and private property for fresh
pickings, the loosely regulated industry faces scientific scrutiny as biologists
and businesses clash over research findings and land managers struggle to
enforce collection policies across huge tracts with scarce
personnel.<BR><BR>Last year, harvesters in the United States bagged as much as
17 million pounds of moss, according to an estimate by Dr. Patricia Muir, a
professor of botany and plant pathology at Oregon State University. Most of the
moss is from the Pacific Northwest and Appalachia, where moderate winters and
abundant rain allow moss to thrive.<BR><BR>Gatherers favor a few popular
species, none of them endangered or threatened (no mosses are), pulling them
from rocks and logs in the East and hardwoods in the West. Harvesters use bare
hands and an occasional rake or ladder, but sometimes they get brazen:
Oregon<BR>officials once saw harvesters who had strung a cable down a small
valley and strapped a shopping cart to it to hoist moss up to the
road.<BR><BR>The question is how soon new moss can take its place. A tree
shrouded in moss may have needed decades or longer to get that way, and after
harvesting, regeneration is even slower. Dr. Kimmerer's study of an
experimentally harvested area found in some cases a recovery rate of only 1
percent per year. "You're looking at 100 years to get back to the initial
volume," she said. "Yes, it's a renewable resource,<BR>but not on any meaningful
time scale."<BR><BR>Land managers in the Pacific Northwest and Appalachia are
trying to curtail legal and illicit gathering. The Monongahela National Forest
in West Virginia has ceased issuing collection permits, and the Siuslaw National
Forest in Oregon limits the amount of moss that can be taken each year -a few
thousand pounds in some districts - but many gatherers flout
restrictions.<BR><BR>"It's a continuous problem," said Rich Babcock, the special
forest products coordinator for the Hebo District in Siuslaw, the busiest
collection area. "You see a lot of moss going down the road in the late evening,
and you really don't know where it's coming from."<BR><BR>At Washington's
Olympic National Park, where no commercial harvesting of any forest product is
allowed, Dan Pontbriand, a ranger, said moss poachers were venturing farther and
farther onto the property for their quarry.<BR><BR>Gathers will often pile bags
of moss in a secluded location and haul it away under cover of darkness. He
estimates that for every arrest forest officials make, confiscating the crop and
issuing a $250 fine, another 10 harvests go unnoticed.<BR><BR>For years, the
moss industry itself went largely unnoticed as well. Last spring, Dr. Muir
finished the first comprehensive survey of the American moss harvesting industry
in a report to the Fish and Wildlife Service and the United States Geological
Survey.<BR><BR>Questioning dozens of botanists, land managers and moss dealers,
she calculated that 10 million to 40 million pounds of moss had been collected
annually nationwide in recent years. Accurate figures are impossible because
many land managers still allow unlimited harvesting. Furthermore, Dr. Muir
said: "You've got a permit, let's say, for 200 pounds. Nothing's
going to stop you from harvesting 10 times that much."<BR><BR>Laws in some
states say otherwise. In Washington and Oregon, the small storehouse operations
and larger forest-product distributors that buy moss from harvesters are
required to check the seller's permit for each haul. Yet whether or not the moss
came from the area designated by the permit is practically impossible for buyers
to know.<BR><BR>The Forest Products Packaging Company of Independence, Ore.,
buys more than 300,000 pounds of moss from harvesters every year. Its owner,
Dick Reinhard, said the burden of obtaining permits and avoiding prohibited
areas has forced many smaller gathering outfits out of the business. He also
says he believes moss grows back faster than scientists claim. After an area is
picked clean, with adequate shade and moisture it "will be regrown within five
years to the point where you can't tell," he said.<BR><BR>At retailers, moss can
fetch as much as $5 for a four-ounce bag, and much of it is sold on the
Internet. Moss export figures are compiled by the United States Department of
Commerce, but domestic sales are not. Dr. Muir puts total annual sales anywhere
from $6 million to $165 million. The market has fluctuated sharply in the last
decade, dropping off in 2001 but doubling last year.<BR><BR>If harvesters and
wholesalers regard moss as a commodity, many park visitors don't notice it at
all. Flourishing in the shadowy boscage of old-growth forests, moss is
nature's wallpaper, with all the lack of sexiness that implies. And though its
perseverance can evoke a kind of meditative sympathy - the poet and occasional
gatherer Theodore Roethke wrote of the guilt he felt after "pulling off flesh
from the living<BR>planet"- the experts calling attention to the plight of moss
realize it hardly possesses the majesty of a humpback whale or the pathos of a
harp seal pup.<BR><BR>"We conservation biologists think of those as the
charismatic megafauna," Dr. Kimmerer said. "I like to think of the mosses as
charismatic microflora, but you have to look close."<BR><BR>Indeed, under the
magnifying glass the seemingly featureless facade becomes a tiny forest unto
itself, a microcosm of stalks and leaves. Without roots, seeds or a vascular
system, moss works hard to build this infrastructure, enduring a two-stage
reproductive cycle that sends millions of spores out a few inches to start new
growth. Only a tiny fraction succeed, though moss can also clone itself with
nearly any<BR>piece: a broken-off shoot or leaf can foster a whole new
plant.<BR><BR>Trees and logs are the most hospitable substrates, though some
moss species have learned to conquer the barren surfaces of rocks, where spores
face astronomical odds of success.<BR><BR>Harvesting removes more than just
moss. The coral reef of the forest, it's the home of dozens of tiny creatures -
mites, springtales, microscopic rotifers, and others. Dr. Neville Winchester, an
entomologist at the University of Victoria, has counted more than 300<BR>species
in some tree canopy moss colonies. And the marbled murrelet, an endangered
seabird, flies miles inland to nest on moss mats.<BR><BR>Moss also retains
several times its weight in water, serving as a humidity regulator for the
forest. A descendant of early algae, moss was the first plant to migrate from
water to land as life on earth was first brewing, and it still depends on
copious moisture for its survival, with tiny sperm fanning out in search of eggs
on a delicate, interstitial film of liquid. No surprise, then, that moss lies
dormant in the warm, dry summer, when most harvesting takes place, and begins
growing with the first rains of fall as the trees shed their leaves and sunlight
trickles down to start photosynthesis.<BR><BR>Concerns about the sustainability
of wild moss lead to one question: can it be raised instead? Though bryology,
the study of mosses, lichens, and liverworts, has been around for centuries,
virtually nothing is known about cultivation. "It really is time that we start
learning how to farm them just like we do corn and tobacco and everything else,"
said Dr. Nalini Nadkarni, a forest ecologist at Evergreen State<BR>College in
Olympia, Wash.<BR><BR>Predicting that moss's low-key nature would be well suited
to the prison setting, where horticulture has become a popular rehabilitation
therapy, Dr. Nadkarni began a moss program last fall at the nearby Cedar Creek
Corrections Center in which about a half-dozen inmates experiment with different
growing methods. Despite promising results, Dr. Nadkarni realizes that
even a large commercial moss farm or two will barely dent the market. "It might
start out as a boutiquey thing," she said, hoping eco-conscious consumers may go
for hand-tended moss the way they have flocked to cachets like green timber
products and shade-grown coffee. "If we don't come up with ways to provide an
alternative, then we're stuck with naked branches."</FONT></P></BODY></HTML>