Paper short abstract:

As environmental damages unsettle the lifeworld of local groups, emotions they might experience towards the harm could be highly fractured and clashing, involving interlacing values that disturb the (un)knowing of pain and gain of the indigenous, bringing on greater precarities and vulnerabilities.

Paper long abstract:

This paper reveals how feelings amidst ecological damages enact, disguise, and unveil each other, in conjuncture with radically changing socio-historical conditions and personal living circumstances. In my case, practices influencing the environment are evaluated fiercely contrasting throughout 30 years, thanks to altered local lifestyles and shifted environmental ideas of the state and indigenous communities. The sudden disruption has voided how the residents interpret their relationships with the environment in the past and the future, leading to tangled emotions that cause profound weight in life. My fieldwork investigated a Tibetan herding community in northwestern China whose ancestral pastureland underwent excessive state-led excavation from the socialist time, until 2016 it's taken as national conservation with the resettlement of herders. Although mining persisted since the 1950s, hurtful experiences of nomads were significantly obscured by the authority of the state, coming-along infrastructural supplies, life-threatening material scarcity, and individuals’ incapacity to learn the full picture of mass-scale mining. The not-yet-realized agony emerged during resettlement as the state legitimizes it by how destructive mining has been, which further complexes the pain with the anguish of leaving one’s habitat. However, the harm is again veiled over, even somewhat invalidated, for there’s a massive improvement in life quality after resettlement and a shared sense of responsibility to ‘protect ecology’. In the plight that harms are consoled with appreciated gains whereas gains come with distressful expenses, local dwellers are stuck in epistemic uncertainty of recognizing how to ever live justly with the environment and to maintain their lifeworld integrity.