Free Range with Mike Livermore

Host Mike Livermore concludes Season 1 of Free Range with a solo episode on the value of interdisciplinary engagement. Livermore begins with the theory behind the podcast—speaking with guests with various perspectives and backgrounds relating to the environment and sustainability—and the tradeoffs between being a generalist rather than a specialist. (0:43 – 4:32) In this episode, he wants to explo...

On today’s episode of Free Range, Michael Livermore speaks with UVA Law colleague Rich Schragger a leading expert on local government, federalism, and urban policy and the author of City Power: Urban Governance in a Global Age. Schragger begins the episode by discussing the idea of ‘city power,’ which is meant to challenge the usual narratives about local governments and cities. (0:42 - 2:41) Live...

On today’s episode of Free Range, Livermore is joined by Michael Greenstone, the Milton Freedman Distinguished Service Professor in Economics and the Director of the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago. He served as the Chief Economist for President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors and has worked for decades engaged in research and policy development on environmental issues. L...

On this episode of Free Range, Mike Livermore interviews Gerald Torres, a professor at the Yale School of the Environment and Yale Law School and Director of the Yale Center for Environmental Justice. Torres explores the connections between environmental law and social justice from a scholarly and practical perspective. The discussion begins with the Yale Center of Environmental Justice and its ef...

On this episode of Free Range, Mike Livermore interviews Katherine Blunt, a journalist at the Wall Street Journal and the recent author of California Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas and Electric and What it Means for America’s Power Grid. The conversation begins with the book’s narrative of criminal charges, with Blunt briefly describing the cast of characters and situations in the book that led...

On this episode of Free Range, Mike Livermore speaks with Jonathan Colmer, an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia’s Department of Economics and the Director of the Environmental Inequality Lab. His research interests are in environmental economics, development economics, and the distributional impacts of environmental policy. Colmer begins by discussing a recent paper of his that exa...

On this episode of Free Range, Mike Livermore speaks with Michelle Wilde Anderson, a law professor at Stanford. Anderson is the author of The Fight To Save The Town: Reimagining Discarded America, published in June 2022. Anderson begins by explaining the subtitle of the book, which draws attention to places that have both high poverty and few governmental resources, challenges that tend to be mutu...

On this episode of Free Range, UVA Law Professor Mike Livermore speaks with Jed Purdy, Duke Law Professor and author of the forthcoming Two Cheers for Politics: Why Democracy is Flawed, Frightening – and Our Best Hope. Purdy begins by discussing why current crises and loss of confidence in democratic institutions drew him to his current project. (0:43-4:37) People have begun to ask more of politic...

On this episode of Free Range, UVA Law Professor Mike Livermore speaks with Henry Skerritt, Curator of Indigenous Arts of Australia at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection at the University of Virginia. Skerritt begins by introducing the Kluge-Rhue and how this collection of over 3,000 works of Indigenous Australian Art ended up at the University of Virginia. He explains that while aboriginal...

On this episode of Free Range, Michael Livermore speaks with Matthew Burtner, a Professor of Compositions and Computer Technologies in the music department at the University of Virginia. Burtner’s work explores ecology and the aesthetic link between human expression and environmental systems. His latest album is Ice Field. Burtner begins by discussion how his music tries to decenter humans. (0:51-...

On this episode of Free Range, Mike Livermore speaks with Moira O’Neill, a professor of Urban and Environmental Planning at the University of Virginia who also has a joint appointment at UVA Law. Her work covers land use, climate change, equity, and resilience. A specific area of her research is land use law and its relationship to housing affordability, integration, and environmental impacts in C...

On this episode of Free Range, Michael Livermore speaks with Ronald Sandler, a Professor of Philosophy at Northeastern University. Sandler writes on environmental ethics, emerging technologies, and ethical issues surrounding climate change, food, and species conservation. His books include Environmental Ethics: Theory and Practice and The Ethics of Species. Livermore and Sandler begin the episode...

On this episode of Free Range, Mike Livermore speaks with Jonathan Adler, a law professor at Case Western who writes on environmental law, federalism, and regulation. In 2020, Brookings Institution Press published Adler’s edited Marijuana Federalism: Uncle Sam and Mary Jane. Livermore and Adler begin their discussion on the topic of federalism and environmental law. Generally, Adler highlights see...

On this episode of Free Range, Mike Livermore speaks with Frances Moore, a Professor of Environmental Science and Policy at UC Davis whose work focuses on climate economics. Recently, Moore was the lead author of a paper in Nature that examines an important set of feedbacks between politics and the climate system. The discussion begins by examining the key differences between the model development...

On this episode of Free Range, Mike Livermore speaks with Dale Jamieson, a Professor of Environmental Studies and Philosophy at New York University. His most recent book, Discerning Experts, was published in 2019 by the University of Chicago Press. The discussion begins with an examination of the tension between animal welfare and environmental ethics. Jamieson traces this tension back to the orig...

On this episode of Free Range, Mike Livermore speaks with Kimberly Fields, who is an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia’s Woodson Institute of African-American and African Studies. Her recent work has focused on environmental justice, race, and inequality at the state level. The podcast begins with Professor Fields explaining why examining environmental policy at the state level is...

On this episode of Free Range, Mike Livermore speaks with Elizabeth Kolbert. Kolbert is a writer at The New Yorker, as well as the author of several books, including The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, for which she won a Pulitzer Prize in 2015. Her most recent book, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future, was published in 2021. The podcast begins with Kolbert discussing how journalis...

On this episode of Free Range, Mike Livermore speaks with Jennifer Cole and Michael Vandenbergh. Dr. Cole is a postdoctoral scholar in social psychology at the Vanderbilt Climate Change Research Network, and Professor Vandenbergh is the David Daniels Allen Distinguished Chair of Law at the Vanderbilt University Law School. Their work examines the political polarization of climate change and covid...

On this episode of Free Range, Mike Livermore speaks with Cara Daggett, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech, about her new book The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work. Daggett begins by speaking about her path to studying energy via her background in biochemistry and politics. Daggett explains that her interest in carbon — the basis of lif...

On this episode of Free Range, Mike Livermore speaks with Nicholas Agar, a moral philosopher who is currently a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Australia. His most recent book, How to be Human in the Digital Economy, was published by MIT Press in 2019. The conversation begins with something of a retrospective of one of Agar’s earlier works, Life’s Intrinsic Value, w...

On this episode of Free Range, Mike Livermore speaks with Arden Rowell, a Professor of Law at the University of Illinois College of Law. Rowell’s work focuses on environmental law, human behavior, and the incorporation of a multidisciplinary approach to the study of environmental law. Her new book, The Psychology of Environmental Law, co-written with Kenworthey Bilz, was recently published by NYU...

On this episode of Free Range, Mike Livermore speaks with Shi-Ling Hsu, the D’Alemberte Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Environmental Programs at the Florida State University College of Law. He is also the author of the book Capitalism and the Environment: A Proposal to Save the Environment, which was published in December 2021 by Cambridge University Press. Professor Hsu begins by discuss...

On this episode of Free Range, Mike Livermore speaks with Karen Bradshaw, a Professor of Law and the Mary Sigler Research Fellow at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. Bradshaw’s work examines the intersection of environmental law and property law. Her most recent book, Wildlife as Property Owners: A New Conception of Animal Rights, contends that property rights can be a...

Today on Free Range, Mike Livermore speaks with his colleague Jonathan Cannon, who retired from UVA Law in May 2021 after over two decades of teaching at the law school. Prior to joining UVA Law, Cannon served as general counsel to the EPA, and his 1998 memo, which has come to be known as “the Cannon memo,” was influential in opening a path for EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. He is curre...

Today on Free Range, Mike Livermore discusses coastal preservation with Karen McGlathery. McGlathery is a professor at the University of Virginia’s Department of Environmental Sciences and the Director of UVA’s Environmental Resilience Institute. McGlathery’s work centers on coastal ecosystems and the discussion today covers a number of different topics related to climate change and coastal commun...