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 …
In 2017, the recently elected Guatemalan president Jimmy Morales launched a nutrition campaign called Crecer Sano: Niñez con futuro (Grow Healthy: Childhood with a Future). Backed by a World Bank loan for $100 million, his program was based on a widely accepted idea that financial investment in children’s early life yields a long-term payback—it’s a good return on investment, to …