ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the Shangri-La's tourism development and environmental changes to theoretical debates about how we might employ political ecology to delimit and redirect our inquiries surrounding nature and society. It introduces Escobar's the anti-essentialist political ecology, a framework that describes biological and historical articulations of nature in three loosely interconnected regimes. capitalist nature regimes, organic nature regimes and techno-nature regimes. The chapter argues that people need to rethink tourism, particularly ecotourism, within the local-global and nature-culture dialectics, rather than taking it as an outcome of green governmentality within a neoliberal economic, social and environmental system. It contributes to the political ecology of tourism by introducing the idea of environmental discourse through which nature is experienced as a certain hybridization of the nature regimes. It shows how tourism can be reviewed in the idea of environmental discourse. Environmental discourse applies itself to individual's everyday lives and marks an individual's identity by how one locates oneself within society and nature.
