82 Sarah Webb
dynamics central to contemporary social life in general” (2014, p. 14). However,
many of these critical works are based on case studies that largely concern the
experiences of Western tourists in international tropical destinations, particularly
a demographic of “white, upper-middle-class, politically liberal/leftist members of
postindustrial Western societies” (Fletcher 2014, p. 2; see also Mowforth and Munt
2009). When scholars instead concentrate on how certain nationals promote places
of nature through everyday practices, what stories emerge about the contexts in
which ecotourism in Southeast Asia is situated?
By examining certain Filipino engagements with a site located on Palawan
Island—declared the “ecotourism capital of the Philippines”—I suggest that
practices associated with the promotion of this place provide important insights
into how ecotourism is embedded within nature, nation, and economy within
the Philippines. In order to explore these dynamics, I position the everyday
consumption and media practices of Filipinos as vital to understanding how
such places are made within national imaginaries. Specifically, I examine two
interrelated sets of practices: first, the importance of Filipinos participating in
and encouraging the text voting that made the Puerto Princesa Underground
River (the “lone Philippine entry”) a winner in an international voter-determined
competition (the N7WN), and second, the huge increases in domestic tourism to
the PPUR that occurred as part of promotion efforts during and after the PPUR-
N7WN campaign. My purpose in doing so is to provide an empirical account of
the ways in which certain Philippine nationals shape understandings of nature
within global flows of people, places, revenue, and images. I offer a case study
that demonstrates how, even when the promotion of natural sites is oriented
toward transnational markets, these connections are made and situated within
the everyday practices through which some Filipinos imagine and realize the
economic and environmental futures of the nation.
These aspirations, their related practices, and the resulting transformations of
space provide the context within which associated ecotourism is situated in the
Philippines. The phenomenon of ecotourism is, then, a means of using sites of
natural heritage (apparently belonging to the nation) in order to produce economic
benefits, which it has been suggested will be shared not only by local residents of
Puerto Princesa City but also by the Philippine nation and Filipino citizens more
broadly.^1 These dynamics contribute toward understanding how the social and
spatial production of the Underground River became a concern owned by two
important groups of Filipinos: first, those who could not afford to travel to the
Underground River but who promoted its entry in an international competition
(through text voting, sharing images via social media, and discussing the campaign
in everyday conversations), and second, the many middle-class Filipino tourists
who considered travelling to the Underground River both as an act of support and
as an opportunity to visit a site of their own Filipino natural heritage.
But what does it mean for these Filipino citizens and consumers to adopt such
concerns within the context of Philippine ecotourism? In considering the powerful
ways in which nationals shape the production of a “wondrous nature,” I suggest
that significant forms of disjuncture have emerged as the spaces associated with