Free Range Podcast: Pitched at the Highest Level of Abstraction

Last September, UVA law professor Mike Livermore debuted the Free Range Podcast – a free-form, far-ranging series of conservations with scientists, philosophers, legal scholars, writers, historians and others probing the infinite dimensions of the climate crisis and exploring ways we might find our way through it. It can be heady stuff, "pitched at the highest level of abstraction," as he says, but it's an opportunity to step back from the day-to-day battles over policy and the exacting practices of science and technology to consider the bigger questions: 

"What is the right way to think about species?"

"Do we owe them an ethical obligation or not?"

"How should we be modeling this stuff?" 

"Are people acting of free will or just responding to their social environment?"

Is anyone listening? Some, and his audience is growing with the addition, of all things, of TikTok to the podcast's social media line-up. Livermore is not out to change minds but to expand them, to perhaps help build the foundation for the next generation of thinking about the toughest issues our planet is facing. Plus, he's having fun doing it. 

You can hear the podcast on Spotify, iTunes, SoundCloud and most places where podcasts are available, with new episodes published bi-weekly. Free Range is sponsored by the Program on Law, Communities, and the Environment (PLACE) at the University of Virginia School of Law. Livermore is director of PLACE and teaches courses on environmental law, regulation and legal technology. His research focuses on environmental law, cost-benefit analysis and the application of data science techniques to legal texts. 

Cat McCue, Communications Generalist with UVA's Office for Sustainability, recently spoke with Livermore about the podcast. This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. Many thanks to Becca Danese ('23) for transcribing the original audio. 

*********************

Cat McCue: Let's start with the origin story of Free Range. When did the idea emerge and why? What was the impetus for it? 

Mike Livermore: So, there are a couple of podcasts that I enjoy listening to. It's a really rich ecosystem of podcasts these days including a fair number of scholars and academics engaged in a serious way. It's a way of taking what we do here in academia and talking about it in the broader world. 

I participated in this very interesting global collaborative workshop on artificial intelligence that was convened by the University Based Institutes for Advanced Study. There were neurologists, computer engineers, software engineers, and computational linguists and historians. A really diverse group of people to talk about artificial intelligence, its future, and its impacts on society. In advance of that, I thought it might be fun to have a podcast and interview people from these different backgrounds. I thought it was a nice way to build a community in that group. 

After that was over, I thought, Hey, that was kind of fun, maybe this is something that could be integrated with my work here at UVA with PLACE (the Program in Law, Community and the Environment). So, the first few podcasts are about AI and society and then I shifted the focus to environment and sustainability and that is what the podcast has been oriented to for the past year. Talking to scholars in different disciplines, scientists here at UVA and elsewhere but also humanists, philosophers, legal scholars, religious studies scholars, and the like. The idea is to have a very broad set of disciplinary perspectives but with a focus on environment and society and sustainability. 

CM: Did you do a DIY Youtube or something? How did you manage the technology part of it? 

ML: It turns out to be pretty easy. I went to some of the podcasters I like and they have podcasts on how to be a podcaster. I started using an online platform -- you can just use your webcam as a microphone and get some headphones and you're basically off to the races. I edited the initial ones myself and that was very time consuming, so I have gotten some help to make them sound semi-professional. But I found some music on the creative common license, and you know, there you go. 

CM: What is your goal for doing this podcast, who is your intended audience? 

ML: I think there are concentric circles of audience. The smallest circle would be folks in academia who have broad interests that cross environment and sustainability. So environmental scientists who are interested in what the lawyers are up to and vice-versa, or economists who are interested in what the lawyers are up to or vice-versa. It's facilitating an interdisciplinary conservation among scholars and academics who are working in the field of sustainability -- environmental lawyers, environmental policy, environmental science. That's the first audience. 

The next group would be graduate and undergraduate students who are interested in this. And people more broadly in the professional community, economists outside of academia, or lawyers, or people working in the public policy space on environmental issues, that would be the next concentric circle. 

And the final one would just be the broader public, the people who just care abut environmental issues and are interested in hearing about what's going on in these disciplines. 

CM: Why do this podcast? 

ML: Well, that's a good question: "Why do stuff?" I think it's kind of fun and I try not to do stuff I don't think is fun. And I always learn a lot from these conversations; it's super interesting. Honestly, I would just do them even if no one ever listened to them. But why post them online? I think we're at a moment where we're trying to figure out what is the future of the environment. We're always kind of at that moment but I think even more so now than in the past. What's next for us? We've had an enormous amount of difficulty getting even basic public policies in place to address the next generation of environmental threats -- like climate change, ocean acidification, plastics in the oceans, overfishing. 

It's incredibly frustrating. We've still got a lot to do, especially from a public policy perspective. Technology has helped. There has been a huge decline in the costs of solar panels and the like, but in terms of getting a policy in place, like a cap-and-trade program or a carbon price or a carbon tax, even at the national level, much less the global level, we haven't. The Paris Agreement is universally recognized as insufficient, but most countries aren't even meeting their obligations under it, so there's a lot of justified frustration. 

Part of the goal of the podcast is to take a step back from the day-to-day. I don't cover things like the Inflation Reduction Act or the latest Supreme Court decision in West Virginia. My focus is to think more broadly about environmental issues. And also to ask, what do people who carefully study these issues think about? So that's the idea, to zoom out and think more broadly and in some sense, to reestablish the foundation for what could be the next generation of thinking about environmental issues, and hopefully, act on them. 

CM: That's a certainly admirable and ambitious goal. Maybe not something you can chart the progress with a bar chart or something but... how would you know what your impact is? You have 31 episodes so far. Based on this broad, macro-goal of establishing the foundation of the next generation of thinking around these incredibly intersected environmental issues, how would you know whether your contribution to that with this podcast is making a difference? 

ML: Doing intellectual work, 

you never really know whether anything you do matters in some general sense. I think a lot of climate scientists have a deep frustration because they feel like they’ve been working for decades establishing a really strong scientific foundation for making policy to address climate change and no one is listening to them. No matter what your field as a scholar, the link between what you do and some “on-the-ground,” “real world” consequence can often be quite attenuated.

But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing, not worth thinking more clearly about these issues, not worth increasing our scientific understanding of whatever issues we face. Or from a philosophical perspective or a humanistic perspective, coming to terms with the challenges we’re facing. So, I don’t know if there is a straight line between this podcast and greenhouse gas reductions. I wouldn’t claim that.

There’s another piece. We are talking about global issues. So, one of the ways I think about this is that I’m one person. Literally one human being. There are 8 billion people out there who get their say about what the future of the planet is going to look like. It can be very difficult because you think, “Well I’m just one person. What is my contribution?” And the reality is that it’s very small. It just is. And that’s part of, it’s a fundamental thing that one has to come to terms with in the world is that you’re just small, you can have a local impact but when you talk about a global issue, you don’t have much of an impact. So that’s just context for the question for “Who cares about my podcast?” I mean maybe yeah, but maybe it would be too much to ask that anyone would have a measurable, identifiable effect on such a profound set of challenges and questions.

CM: Right, there is rarely a direct line between cause and effect, but perhaps another way to gauge the success or impact of the podcast is to ask what kind of reactions have you had. What have people been saying? How many followers do you have and is that growing?

ML: Yeah, well mostly, as I said, I would do this because I think it’s fun and interesting. I think there are people who are listening and engaging but there are just a gazillion podcasts out there. And especially in the early part of doing the project like this, there’s a little bit of “if you build it, they will come” kind of thing.

In terms of audience, the goal isn’t to have like a million people listen to the podcast. That’s very unrealistic and just kind of beside the point, I think, given the conversations that I’m having. I do get feedback from my colleagues and students, they tell me they enjoy the podcast. Yeah, people are listening but we’re a long way from Joe Rogan, that is for sure.

We do have a social media presence now. We have a couple of undergraduate students who have been working to establish our online presence and so we have an Instagram account, and a TikTok account, which actually has had quite a bit of growth. We have little mini trailers for the episodes, So, the goal is to blow up on TikTok.

CM:  Well, you’ll have to have a Free Range Podcast dance in order to do that.

ML: We should. That’s coming next, don’t worry (laughs). I think the TikTok account is an end unto itself even if it doesn’t generate traffic to the podcast. Even if they don’t want to listen to an hour-long episode but will listen to a two-minute clip, I think that’s actually fine because they get value out of that.

CM: How do you pick your guests and topics?

ML: I try to balance between different fields, between UVA people and non-UVA people. The goal isn’t just to create something just for the UVA community but in reality, we have a lot going on here at the university. There is a lot of faculty and scholars working on issues in this area, so I could spend a year, easily, talking with UVA people who are interesting and worth talking with.

Another part of this is I am working on a book about thinking broadly about environmental policy, ethics, how concern for the environment fits into our daily lives and our society. There are various themes I’m interested in exploring in this book and so I’m choosing people for the podcast who I think can tell me something interesting about that topic.

CM: In terms of thinking about who you’re going to invite and which topic to talk about, are you also looking to make it politically diverse? Are you getting people who offer a more contrarian view of the prevailing thinking about the climate crisis or climate solutions?

ML: There is always going to be that question of what counts as reasonable discourse. The reality is that there are tons of people in our society who have QAnon conspiracy theory-style beliefs, and if you really wanted to be representative of the views present in our society, you would have people like that on the show. Because it’s not an insubstantial number of people who think the 2020 election was stolen. There’s a lot of diversity and that’s good in many of respects, but that means there are going to be a lot of people with views that are not reasonable, frankly, and it’s absolutely right to draw a boundary around what kind of discourse you engage with.

And that is true with respect to climate change as well. There are people who on the science of climate change, their views are not legitimate. There’s just way too much evidence for them to hold the views they hold. And if someone’s not willing to listen to evidence, to update their empirical views of the world, or if they hold moral or ethical views that are just beyond the pale of what a reasonable person can think in contemporary society, then yeah, I’m not all that interested in giving them a platform but also there’s just not a lot I’m going to gain out of interacting with them.

That said, this creates a problem because you have to use judgment to draw this boundary and you can draw it too narrow. And as a consequence, you don’t interact with people who are reasonable but who hold different views. So you have to make a judgement about what constitutes the space where reasonable people can disagree. I try and keep it within that realm. We don’t have people who say that there’s no such thing as climate change. I don’t think that’s a set of views I’m interested in going over. But disciplinary diversity – economists, philosophers, scientists and the like – I think that’s a more interesting kind of diversity.

CM: As a communicator, I’m curious if you would include or have included people in the communications field, somebody like Andrew Revkin or the folks with Yale’s program on Climate Communications, people who are so key in terms of how the public is learning and shaping opinions about these issues.

ML: Journalists are always interesting. I had Elizabeth Kolbert on and she’s a well-known writer and journalist. Also, I had a couple social scientists and a lawyer together to discuss social psychology, which is kind of similar stuff. Climate communications, how people respond to different types of framing and how people’s social environments effect how they respond to different kind of climate messages -- I am interested in that.

I’m very much not interested in what a particular framing is or should we frame things in terms of the benefits of climate action versus the harms of climate change. People debate that, it’s a tactical question. It’s not that it’s not important -- the environmental community can really focus on those questions, but this podcast is something different.  

Environmental advocacy was my first job out of college. I spent five years working for an environmental group in New York, went to law school and then before I came here I started up a think tank that had a pretty substantial advocacy component. One thing I thought to myself in my 20s was, you can spend 100 hours thinking about tactics, but you can have an equal amount of improvement in your performance if you spend 10 hours thinking about strategy. And you can have the same amount of improvement if you think one hour about what your goals are. Because if you get your goals one degree off, that’s a huge problem because all your strategy is oriented towards a goal that’s not quite right. And if you get your strategy off then you’re supplementing them with tactics, that even if successful are going to achieve strategic ends that are a little bit off. And they’re going to be for a slightly incorrect goal.

CM: So the degree of divergence just increases as you proceed with your campaign.

ML: It’s like a boat. At the beginning of your journey, you’re one degree off, you’re going to land in Africa rather than Europe. Whereas at the end of the journey if you’re one degree off, it doesn’t matter. In any case, it’s important to think tactically and strategically and important to think about your goals. This podcast is pitched at the highest level of abstraction which is – how do we think about goals? Not even what goals should we have, but how should we think about that question. So in that sense it’s very removed from the day-to-day of climate politics and policy. Part of my hope is that it’s actually refreshing to take a step out of the tactical and day-to-day and say it’s fun to think about things like what is the right way to think about species, do we owe them an ethical obligation, how should we be modeling this stuff, and are people acting of free will or just responding to their social environment. I think people in the policy trenches can still enjoy these conversations and come away from them energized and excited to return to their work. It’s sometimes nice to have that broader context, use your brain in a different way and be reminded why you care about this stuff in the first place.

CM: Who would you in your wildest dreams want to interview for Free Range? Is there anybody out there who would be your top guest?

ML: Honestly, Elizabeth Kolbert was early on and she was on a list that I wrote at the beginning of the podcast for “maybe someday.” I was super fortunate to get her on the podcast early on so it’s kind of tough to come up with who the second would be. Because you could say someone like Bill McKibben, but it’s really not a Bill McKibben-kind of podcast. I mean, a former EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) administrator would be interesting, but that’s a little bit in the weeds.

CM: How about globally? Are you doing an internationally?

ML: I had an Australian on the show. Nick Agar, a philosopher.

CM: Maybe you could branch out into that?

ML: Yeah, I think that’s interesting. The conversation is different in Europe and in India. It would be interesting. I’d have to figure out who exactly… I’m pretty enmeshed in the US discourse.

CM: How long will you keep doing the podcast?

ML: Good question. I’ve set a goal of 100 episodes and then will reassess whether this is a good use of my time. I’ve been enjoying it and if I stop enjoying it I would quit, frankly. I think at 100 episodes, I’ll see if people are finding this helpful. I’m not going to run out of interesting people to talk to, that’s for sure. So as long as my dean thinks this is a good use of my time, I think I’ll keep doing it.