ABSTRACT
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 PPURN7WN 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.
