Anthropologie & moss loss

Anthropologie's store windows and displays have me upset. They feature a lot of moss - wait, let me rephrase that - A LOT OF MOSS (and liverworts in there too) and fungi, mostly shelf fungi. I wish I had a picture...

Anyway, far too much, in just the one store. And how many other stores have the same displays? Why worry, you ask? Because, where do they get these biological elements? They are harvested from the wild. Probably with permits, but still, what is the ecological repercussion(s) of this? {My concerns also apply to mining peat moss for orchids and garden beds - bad, bad, bad).

This study, sadly, supports my sadness.

Yearly revenues from sales of commercial moss harvest permits were reported to be US$19,650. In contrast, estimates of total harvests based on export data and assumptions about those data suggest that the mean yearly harvest for the years 1998–2003 was between 4.6 and 18.4 million air-dry kg (yearly minimum and maximum estimated at 0.9 and 37.4 million air-dry kg, respectively). Moss sales (domestic plus exports) are estimated to total between US$˜6 million and 165 million per year. The wide ranges in these estimates illustrate how little is known about the moss harvest trade. In combination with lack of information about the size of the moss inventory, reaccumulation rates, and species and ecosystem functions potentially affected by harvest, results indicate that policy makers and land managers lack critical information on which to base harvest regulations.