See, it's about wood stoves. Folks have wood stoves, the folks themselves will go out and chop up them dead trees. Next, it is about access... Build roads into the interior and let folks use them - Because they will use the roads to go cut down those dead trees to put in their wood stoves. And don't tell me for a single damn minute those wood stoves make more pollution that the forest fires do themselves...
And now that there's roads, when there IS a fire, you can get heavy equipment in to fight fires, building massive firebreaks with gigantic cats and a thousand people... An army of sawyers and bumpers, and ground crews, toughened to the work of the mountains and working with those machines... But where does the equipment come from to fight the fires? Who has those big cats? Who has that kind of work force?
Well the logging industry of course.
Exploit it or burn it down. One or the other. You choose.