Interview: Pyrogeographer Crystal Kolden on fighting California's modern megafires

Crystal Kolden is a professor of fire science at UC Merced and what's known as a pyrogeographer, studying not just how fires function as a natural process, but how we humans interact with it as well. She is also trained as a wildland firefighter.
"I often say, let's be honest, I was not a very good firefighter," Kolden said. "I am not athletically inclined at all. And that is incredibly difficult work. But what I really got interested in was trying to understand what I was seeing on the landscape and why we were fighting fires in some of the most remote places in the U.S. that I knew had adapted to fire, that had evolved with fire."