Leaving aside the discussion of Federal control of forest lands, it's not at all clear to me that "owner interest" would have prevented this fire.
First off, the prevailing approach over the past several decades has been to prevent fires. There's no reason to expect that private owners would have done any differently, especially if they were under the misapprehension that fires = loss of timber income.
Second, even if the value of controlled, small burns were known, it would probably be too expensive for small land owners to do it on a large scale. (This leaves large corporate land owners, with which I have a different set of problems.)
And third, it's so damned dry here this year that probably nothing would have helped. Yesterday the humidity in the fire area was in the single digits.