The Holiday Farm Fire has been mostly contained since October, but the Bureau of Land Management is now proposing salvage harvesting, a controversial forest management practice where trees affected by natural disaster are logged.
The BLM is proposing more than 1,500 acres in salvage timber sales on the McKenzie watershed and could bypass environmental assessments because the Trump administration has expanded the use of categorical exclusions, which allow federal agencies to move faster on salvage harvesting. But the BLM says environmental impacts are still considered in this rule and selling affected trees would mean fewer living trees cut down this year.