By Brenna Owen A shaggy, cool-green lichen hangs from the trunk of a tree in a forest on northeastern Vancouver Island, growing on the bark like coral on a rocky sea floor. Lichenologist Trevor Goward has named it oldgrowth specklebelly, and while the slow-growing lichen is a species at risk in its own right, he says it is also an indicator of forests that are “the oldest of the old.” “It’s what it tells us about the forest that we walk through,” Goward says, comparing ancient forests to libraries and museums. “They are the continuity from the past.” Old-growth advocate Joshua Wright photographed oldgrowth specklebelly this summer in a forest about 400 kilometres northwest of Victoria. The forest is “strikingly beautiful,” he says, with towering yellow cedars growing for hundreds

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