California has more acreage of steep, super rugged geography than the entire state of Alabama. Many of these areas are totally inaccessible for most equipment, even for those on foot, add in very strong winds, with embers that can travel for *miles* into neighborhoods and other areas...
So your "mature adult" comment is quite juvenile and ignorant.
Or are you suggesting sending in several hundred thousand people every summer to be airlifted into hundreds of square miles, into all these super rugged steep areas to cut the brush?
Actually, Gov Schwarznegger put in place state funds to help pay for private homeowners to do voluntary fire management on their own property: http://www.fire.ca.gov/rsrc-mgt_forestryassistance_cfip.php
Creating firebreaks on your property (among other actions) can help save your land.
Logging roads, when placed strategically, can double a natural firebreak as well as provide quick access for heavy fire-fighting equipment to ingress into the fight.
Such firebreaks also allow more options for backfires so as to create an enormous area where a wildfire has no fuel.
...all of this was pioneered in the Appalachian mountains of Alabama (and yes, we routinely get 40mph winds in the Appalachian chain).
This is why the forest fires of Alabama that made the news back in 1940 are no longer newsworthy, because scientific forest management reduced 50,000 acre wildfires down to 100 acre brushfires...and that’s what is attempting to be copied by California (at least, where the enviro-wackos haven’t halted such efforts).