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Bowen Island residents are outraged over a plan that could open nearly 30 per cent of their picturesque island to industrial-scale logging, says their mayor.

The 50-square-kilometre island sits just off West Vancouver at the entrance to Howe Sound, features in offshore views from other parts of the Lower Mainland, and has not been logged in decades.

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But foresters are now viewing Bowen as a potential source for as much as 250 truckloads of fir, hemlock and cedar logs a year for the next two decades, Mayor Murray Skeels said in an interview this week.

Skeels said he only learned of the plan last month when a planning forester at B.C. Timber Sales, a government agency that manages about 20 per cent of the provincial Crown’s annual allowable cut of trees, contacted the municipality about its proposed “forest stewardship plan.”

Photo by John Dowler/Google Earth/B.C. Government/DIO/NOAA/U.S. Navy/NGA/GEBCO

Such a plan, as B.C. Timber Sales said in a “legal notice” printed in the local paper earlier this month, is a “strategic-level planning document (that) shows the location of forest development units and provides the results, strategies and measures that the plan holders will follow for government’s objectives for various forest and resource values.”