THE ART OF PLANTING: Inmates plant seedlings of endangered prairie plants at Stafford Creek Corrections Center in Aberdeen, Washington© BENJ BRUMMOND & SARAH JOY STEELE
In the old-growth rainforests of the Pacific Northwest, lush green pelts of moss swaddle tree trunks and hang from branches like ancient, sodden scarves. In some patches, however, the trees are bare, scraped clean by people harvesting mosses for use in the multimillion-dollar floriculture trade.
When forest ecologist Nalini Nadkarni first got wind of the practice in the late 1990s, she was concerned. Nadkarni, then at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, knew better than most the ecological importance of mosses. Moreover, in 2001 she had shown that once removed, mosses do not readily grow back and are not replaced by diverse new growth for years (Canadian Journal of Botany, 79:1-8, 2001). The commercial harvesting taking place in the US northwest, much of it ...
