Self-devouring growth : a planetary parable as told from Southern Africa

Bibliographic Information

Self-devouring growth : a planetary parable as told from Southern Africa

Julie Livingston

(Critical global health : evidence, efficacy, ethnography)

Duke University Press, 2019

  • : pbk

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Includes index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

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.

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

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