Free Range with Mike Livermore

About Free Range with Mike Livermore

Law professor interviewing a wide range of guests on topics in law, politics, philosophy, science, the environment, and AI.

Publisher

Free Range with Mike Livermore

Category

education

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

2 Sept 2021

Latest episode

16 Dec 2024

Latest episodes

3 of 64 episodes have a transcript.

1. 

   16 Dec 2024TRANSCRIPT

   S2E25: Natalie Jacewicz on Conservation and Abundance

   Professor Natalie Jacewicz discusses her paper on the tension between protecting ecological collectives and individual animals in environmental law with host Mike Livermore in an interview.

2. 

   8 Apr 2024TRANSCRIPT

   S2E24: Adam Ortiz on Life as an EPA Regional Administrator

   On this episode of Free Range, host Mike Livermore is joined by Adam Ortiz, the MidAtlantic regional administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency. The conversation begins with a discussion of the role of a regional administrator at EPA. Ortiz emphasizes the importance of federal agencies working with local and state governments due to the complexity of environmental issues. He also discusses some of the specific challenges of the MidAtlantic: it is a coastal region with a rich industrial past; an agricultural region; and, a region where resource extraction has been prevalent. Taken together, the diversity of histories, industries, and geographies make the MidAtlantic a fascinating and challenging region for environmental governance. The topic switches to environmental justice-related work and an ongoing Superfund cleanup in the city of Baltimore clean-up. The two discuss the value of redeveloping areas that experienced environmental damage in the past, especially given the concentration of these sites along lines of race and class. Ortiz discusses EPA’s efforts to identify and clean up these sites to “plug them back into society.” There is a large human component to this kind of work, and Ortiz emphasizes the importance of giving communities a voice and encouraging open, honest dialogue with residents. This is one of the main ways the EPA addresses the negative impacts of redevelopment, such as gentrification. They go on to discuss how EPA works with state and local actors on complex projects with many overlapping jurisdictions. (0:28-34:30) The conversation shifts to the ways Ortiz’s department works to support indigenous tribes. The EPA works with tribes to support their sovereignty, protect their land, and help facilitate their capacity for environmental governance. Livermore then inquires about the Chesapeake Bay, a body of water that has been of great concern to the EPA in recent years. Water quality has been improved overall, although progress hasn’t been linear, and EPA has only limited authority as a federal agency. Because of this, pollution control falls heavily on nearby states, and Ortiz points to recent efforts by the states of Pennsylvania and Virginia. The conversation turns to the intersection of politics and environmental governance at the regional level. Livermore asks whether regional governance faces less political polarization, and Ortiz observes that, compared to the national level, regional interactions are often less politicized. Ortiz praises a personal approach to solving complex issues, asserting the effectiveness of working with people directly and getting to know them personally. Additionally, there is a local advantage when it comes to political support for environmental initiatives, because people tend to care about places they interact with, regardless of political affiliation. (34:31-1:01:09)

3. 

   21 Mar 2024TRANSCRIPT

   S2E23: SFI Working Group on Biodiversity

   This bonus episode is an impromptu roundtable discussion that was part of a working group at the Santa Fe Institute in February 2024 on biodiversity and the sustainable development goals. The Santa Fe Institute is an interdisciplinary research institute dedicated to the study of complex adaptive systems. It was founded in 1984 by a group of scientists, many affiliated with with the Los Alamos National Laboratory. SFI host a range of gatherings at different scales, form public conferences to small working groups. This working group was organized by two SFI affiliated scholars: Andy Dobson who is a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton and Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, an evolutionary anthropologist who is at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. They group included scholars and practitioners from the social and behavioral sciences, conservation biology and ecology and law. The focus on the group was the question of how to jumpstart progress on halting biodiversity loss in the context of the the UN sustainable development goals. The conversation in this podcast is with several members in the working group. The others in the conversation were Liam Smith, an expert in behavioral change and the director of BehaviorWorks Australia at Monash University; Tim O’Brien, an ecologist who worked for decades at the Wildlife Conservation Society; Margaret Kinnaird, an ecologist and the Global Wildlife Practice Leader at the World Wildlife Fund for Nature – International; Matt Turner, a post-doc and expert on computational modeling at the Stanford School of Sustainability; and Tim Caro, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Bristol.

Inside a recent episode

S2E25: Natalie Jacewicz on Conservation and Abundance

Published 16 Dec 2024 · Transcript excerpt

[…] For some animals, it was clear that they absolutely would use humane methods or otherwise not kill the animal. In other circumstances, it seemed more like, well, we're going to prioritize humane methods. Maybe maybe get to messier things if we need to. That was a really common across the agencies. Then what was a bit more mixed was some agencies were really interested in trying to avoid conducting removals at all because they seemed to think that animals were better off in the wild, and so all things being equal, it would be good to leave them in the wild. They would try to go about techniques that were nonlethal and maybe stressful for the animals, like shooting rubber bullets at sea lions, using pyrotechnics to scare double -crusted cormorants, but things to disperse the animals without actually killing them. […]

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

13 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

6 ratings

Contact Free Range with Mike Livermore

Guest appearances

Does not typically book guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.