Dr. Julie Livingston, Julius Silver Professor at New York University, recently published Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa with Duke University Press. Livingston was the first student to receive the PhD in African History from Emory in 2001. In 2013, she received a MacArthur Fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Her work sits at the intersection of history, anthropology, and public health. Read Duke UP’s summary of Self-Devouring Growth below and see her other work on Livingston’s NYU faculty profile page.

“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.”