This is what I’m talking about. What’s the political pressure against this? Is it that increasing frequency is perceived by property owners as increased risk?

It depends on how you define “catastrophic.” If you mean “fires that burn a lot of acres of forest,” you can’t and you shouldn’t try, especially in the chaparral scrublands along the coast. Those areas are going to burn. You can reduce the intensity of those in pine forests fires by increasing their frequency and cutting down a lot of small trees, so that you have a more open, grassy forest floor, the way it was when Native Americans were managing their lands with regular burns. But if you mean “fires that burn a lot of homes,” as Mike Davis has discussed elsewhere, a good place to start would be to stop giving fabulously wealthy homeowners massive subsidies for fire insurance when they build in known fire-prone areas.