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.
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.
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
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.
“Highly engaging, deeply thoughtful, and beautifully written,
Self-Devouring Growth helps us to understand the environmental
dangers the planet faces not as something to be avoided or
prevented, but as something to expect and to live through. Julie
Livingston's thinking about environmental and other futures is a
breath of fresh air and cuts across stale debates around economic
development and environmental sustainability in a very original
way.”
*Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of
Distribution*
“Julie Livingston's concept of ‘self-devouring growth’ will become
an essential tool across many forms of scholarship—and for
concerned earth dwellers across the planet. As Livingston puts it,
“GROW! is a mantra so powerful that it obscures the destruction it
portends.” Self-Devouring Growth tells of the failure of Botswana's
public water system, strained by failing rains and pumped dry by
mining and commercial beef rearing for export. Regarded as a
success of development, Botswana is the ideal site for a parable of
the Anthropocene.”
*Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene*
"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."
*Africa Is a Country*
"An imaginative parable about human society and life on Earth. . .
. The author notes that everyone cries foul when poorer countries
achieve a standard of living enjoyed elsewhere, yet the global
inequality reflected in this complaint suggests the need for
collective creative thinking about new forms of growth for life on
Earth to survive. Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates
through faculty; general readers."
*Choice*
"I find self-devouring growth a powerful and clarifying concept.
I’m more accustomed to thinking about the climate change emergency
through numbers, like the temperature beyond which the earth must
not warm, or the number of tons of carbon we can safely put into
the atmosphere. Instead, Livingston illuminates our way of life.
She is asking a lot of the reader: she is asking us to understand
that many of the things that make us feel well, prosperous, and
secure are the very things that are killing us. . . . It is deeply
unsettling to live with."
*Dissent*
"Livingston has forged a path into an anthropology of futures, one
responsive to and reflective of the Anthropocene and the threats to
human survival we witness daily on our ever-more vulnerable planet.
She offers methodological and conceptual tools that will enable
other scholars to grapple with futures, those that are unfolding
now because of self-devouring growth, and those we want to imagine
differently. This book is for everyone."
*Medical Anthropology Quarterly*
“I like reading Julie Livingston’s Self-Devouring Growth as a push
against the consumption of modernist time—that is, against the
suspension of historical flux, imaginative possibility, and
alter-social development.... The book so convincingly dispels
efforts to reduce the planetary condition to a matrix problem
begging for technological solutions....”
*Somatosphere*
“It is a testament to the distilled clarity and prescience of Julie
Livingston’s parable of a book that its title, Self-Devouring
Growth, can strike one immediately as both so true and suddenly so
evident....”
*Somatosphere*
“[Self-Devouring Growth is] a book that offers an elegant and
important argument about industrial capitalism and growth that is
devouring the world in which we live.... It is a book firmly
grounded in critical medical anthropology, which has for a long
time dug into the political economy of health and the structural
violence of capitalism....”
*Somatosphere*
Only Julie Livingston could write this book because of the sources,
sensibilities, and experiences from which she draws.... [She] leads
us to think about the biggest burning question of our common era:
What kind of future is possible when our ways of living are
literally invested in our collective destruction?”
*Somatosphere*
“Through the realist genre of the parable, this marvelous little
book discusses an interconnected world organized by ‘self-devouring
growth’.... This immensely readable book will appeal to a broad
audience of academics, policymakers and practitioners in
international development....”
*Progress in Development Studies*
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