This article is part of the following series: Book forum
This book forum brings together seven scholars to discuss Julie Livingston’s Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa (Duke 2019), a story of what grows alongside “growth” and the price of “a good life.” Botswana offers lessons that are peopled and elemental; lessons that tug between the local and the global. Livingston shows how water, food, transportation…
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 that everything that follows in its slim 120 odd pages will then appear as the confirmation of all that the title had come to pre-organize …
Why is it so difficult to write about such a nice book––a book that offers an elegant and important argument about industrial capitalism and growth that is devouring the world in which we live? The originality of how this story is recounted through a succession of tales that come to be imbricated into each other, skillfully looped together in the …
As the stark realities of our planetary predicament – ecological crisis, global pandemics, species extinction, intractable social inequality – become daily more visible, it is now widely argued that humanity’s appreciable mark on the earth system has culminated in a geological epoch of our own making: the ‘Anthropocene’. Geologists continue to examine the stratigraphic signals left by the Anthropocene, while …