Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa

Author:   Julie Livingston
Publisher:   Duke University Press
ISBN:  

9781478006398


Pages:   176
Publication Date:   20 September 2019
Format:   Paperback
Availability:   In Print   Availability explained
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Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa


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Overview

Under capitalism, economic growth is seen as the key to collective well-being. In Self-Devouring Growth Julie Livingston upends this notion, showing that while consumption-driven growth may seem to benefit a particular locale, it produces a number of unacknowledged, negative consequences that ripple throughout the wider world. Structuring the book as a parable in which the example of Botswana has lessons for the rest of the globe, Livingston shows how fundamental needs for water, food, and transportation become harnessed to what she calls self-devouring growth: an unchecked and unsustainable global pursuit of economic growth that threatens catastrophic environmental destruction. As Livingston notes, improved technology alone cannot stave off such destruction; what is required is a greater accounting of the web of relationships between humans, nonhuman beings, plants, and minerals that growth entails. Livingston contends that by failing to understand these relationships and the consequences of self-devouring growth, we may be unknowingly consuming our future.

Full Product Details

Author:   Julie Livingston
Publisher:   Duke University Press
Imprint:   Duke University Press
Weight:   0.249kg
ISBN:  

9781478006398


ISBN 10:   1478006390
Pages:   176
Publication Date:   20 September 2019
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print   Availability explained
This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  ix Prologue: A Planetary Parable 1 1. Rainmaking and Other Forgotten Things  11 2. In the Time of Beef  35 Cattle to Beef: A Photo Essay of Abstraction  61 3. Roads, Sand, and the Motorized Cow  85 4. Power and Possibility, or Did You Know Aesop Was Once a Slave?  121 Notes  129 Index  153

Reviews

Livingston has written a beautiful book, which speaks from Tswana cosmology towards the complexities of global problems, and that points towards forms of activism that we can all take forward. -- Shannon Morreira * Africa Is a Country *


Author Information

Julie Livingston, a 2013 recipient of a MacArthur “Genius Grant,” is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University and author of Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic, also published by Duke University Press, and Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana.

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