14 Tania Lewis
In chapter 5, Chris Hudson turns to the city-state of Singapore that, while once
constructed as a Mecca for consumers, has been recently rebranded from a “Garden
City” to a “City in a Garden.” Central to this shift has been the reconstruction of
Singapore as a kind of eco-theme park, a “dazzling green sensorium” heavily
reliant on affect and the production of an eco-aesthetic, a process that has included
developments such as the “naturalization” of spaces in the airport. While on the
one hand this development can be seen purely as a value-adding exercise for
global consumers and investors alike, Hudson argues that the long-term greening
of Singapore has had real impact in terms of the conservation of bio-diversity and
other environmental benefits, with the island’s green cover growing from 36 per
cent in 1987 to 47 per cent in 2007. The chapter thus illustrates the contradictory
nature of attempts to tie green governance to the logics of consumption, with the
Singaporean state’s practices of conservation of rainforest cover and continued
greening of urban areas tied to an ongoing investment in a carbon-intensive and
globalized economy of consumption.
In chapter 6, Sarah Webb examines another type of ecotourism, based not
in a city but on the island of Palawan in the Philippines. Drawing on a long-
term multi-sited ethnography focused on an underground river on Palawan,
she demonstrates the ways that ecotourism, while framed in part by globalized
discourses and practices, is embedded within localized constructions of nature,
nation, and economy. Examining a government campaign to have the site
recognized as a “Wonder of Nature” through an international competition, she
traces how the underground river became the focus of vast text and Internet voting
endeavors, a process that saw not only Palawan transformed discursively into a
site of national ecological significance but also saw significant material reshaping
of place. As she notes, while ecotourism is framed as potentially contributing to
the environmental and economic prosperity of the Philippines, such benefits are
uneven, with indigenous Tagbanua and Batak families living in the region rarely
benefitting from tourism revenue or related employment, pointing to the limits of
narrowly economic and nationalist models of environmental place making.
Chapters 7 to 9 foreground the role of media in shaping, enabling and, in
some cases, constraining environmental awareness, critique, and activism, from
mainstream journalism to blogging and mobile games. Focusing on China and
its media coverage of environmental issues, in chapter 7 Wanning Sun sets her
discussion of Chinese media discourses and practices in the context of arguments
concerning the country’s emerging “green public sphere.” Focusing on three key
media and cultural contexts—the state news media, lifestyle television programs,
and the realm of consumer behavior and the market—she suggests that while
China’s environmental journalism may have been more open to critical reflection
in the past, this critical space has diminished rather than expanded in recent years as
environmental problems caused by intensive industrialization and rising coal use
have taken on a national and more politically sensitive dimension. Paradoxically,
while the public has become more conscious than ever of the environmental risk
they are living with (a recurrent theme in lifestyle media), Sun suggests that green
activism and public debates on environmental issues may have much less space