“Are we the cows of the future?” The digital management of nature and humans with Professor Esther Leslie, Birkbeck University, London

Episode 45 May 17, 2021 00:56:33
“Are we the cows of the future?”  The digital management of nature and humans  with Professor Esther Leslie, Birkbeck University, London
Sustainability Now! on KSQD.org
“Are we the cows of the future?” The digital management of nature and humans with Professor Esther Leslie, Birkbeck University, London

May 17 2021 | 00:56:33

/

Show Notes

Join host Ronnie Lipschutz and Dr. Esther Leslie, Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck University in London.  “Political Aesthetics highlights the complex and ambiguous connections of aesthetics with social, cultural and political experiences in contemporary societies.”  This past January, Leslie published an entry in “The Stone,” a New York Times column on philosophy.  There, she asked “Are we the cows of the future?” to be manipulated and managed like livestock. Among other topics, we talk about contemporary utopian visions of nature, digital surveillance and the relationship of humans to nature.

You can find links to Dr. Leslie's publications here: https://www.bbk.ac.uk/our-staff/profile/8008438/esther-leslie#publications

Other Episodes

Episode 170

November 23, 2025 00:53:30
Episode Cover

The ABCs of California Native Bees with Krystle Hickman, Conservation Photographer and National Geographic Explorer

If you venture out into parks, farms and gardens with various flowering species, you are almost sure to see European honeybees flying about.  When...

Listen

Episode 56

October 24, 2021 00:56:01
Episode Cover

What’s slough? I don’t know, what’s slough with you? with Dr. Kerstin Wasson, Elkhorn Slough

Have you ever wondered what is going on upstream when you cross the Highway 1 bridge over Elkhorn Slough?  Or why there are marshes...

Listen

Episode 176

February 15, 2026 00:54:32
Episode Cover

The Water Remembers—My Indigenous Family’s Fight to Save a River and a Way of Life with Amy Bowers Cordalis Ridges to Riffles Indigenous Conservation Group

The removal of four dams from the Klamath River in Northern California is rapidly becoming one of the great recent success stories in conservation...

Listen