Self-Devouring Growth
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Self-Devouring Growth

A Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa

Julie Livingston

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eBook - PDF

Self-Devouring Growth

A Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa

Julie Livingston

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About This Book

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.

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Information

Publisher
Duke University Press Books
Year
2019
ISBN
9781478007005
Topic
Geschichte
Subtopic
Afrikanische Geschichte
34
CHAPTER 
ONE
a 
private 
property 
model 
that 
privileges 
human 
beings 
as 
indi-
viduals 
only 
by 
way 
of 
their 
claims 
to 
citizenship/membership 
in 
a 
political 
entity 
and 
cleaves 
them 
off 
from 
other 
species.
e 
animated 
ecology 
is 
not 
a 
nature 
out 
there 
upon 
which 
humans 
act 
or 
from 
which 
humans 
extract. 
It 
is 
a 
living 
mani-
festation 
of 
a 
tangle 
of 
historical 
relationships 
between 
enti-
ties 
large 
and 
small, 
humans 
past 
and 
present. 
In 
an 
animated 
ecology, 
I 
would 
suest, 
limits 
on 
growth 
are 
always 
present 
in 
some 
form. 
But 
in 
a 
developmental 
state 
where 
nature—now 
separated 
from 
humans—becomes 
an 
object 
with 
limits 
to 
be 
overcome, 
domesticated, 
quantified 
through 
technology, 
end-
less 
growth 
is 
the 
very 
point. 
e 
developmentalist 
state 
is 
not 
the 
only 
political 
formation 
with 
this 
relationship 
to 
growth. 
It 
seems 
foundational 
to 
liberalism, 
hence 
Malthus; 
to 
em-
pire, 
hence 
the 
Soviet 
cotton 
schemes; 
and 
of 
course 
to 
capital-
ism. 
Within 
this 
telos 
of 
growth, 
what 
kind 
of 
bios 
is 
possible? 
What 
sort 
of 
technopolitics 
can 
we 
imagine 
will 
lead 
to 
what 
sort 
of 
happiness? 
What 
political 
form 
can 
again 
take 
hold 
of 
the 
clouds, 
the 
rain, 
the 
sun?

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