From Wasteland to Wetland? Nature and Nation in China's Tibet

The environmental history of Lhasa's Lhalu wetland reveals problems with competing ecological nationalist narratives of the Chinese state and Tibetan exiles. Both deny Tibetans the possibility of being historical agents vis-à-vis nature. The article traces a series of environmental projects enacted on the wetland from the 1950s to the present. Each one, enacted to secure the unstable edges of state sovereignty, ironically paved the way for the next. Certain aspects must be excluded from both ecological nationalist narratives and political ecological analyses because they do not conform to the linear, homogenous times and spaces required by narratives of the nation and universalized “nature.” Disrupting these teleologies creates space for a fuller spectrum of accounts, memories, and practices of nature.