Mongolia’s Mother Ocean

Abstract This article is concerned with ecologies of transformation, and it investigates how land, growth and pollution interrelate in northern Mongolia’s Khövsgöl Dalai watershed and Khatgal village. In an ecology where socio-ecological ruptures emerged from transformative processes such as infrastructural and industrial development, nature conservation, land privatisation and tourism, politics and human–environment relationships unfolded in ambiguous ways, leading to paradoxical modes of growth. As the only village in northern Mongolia’s Khövsgöl province, and marking the southern entrance to the Khövsgöl Lake National Park ( KLNP ), Khatgal is a place where the past ten years of intense seasonal tourism have left their mark. I draw on long-term ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Khatgal and recent debates in environmental anthropology to show how varied imaginaries and realities of growth clash and conflate within a land–growth–pollution triad. I argue that land privatisation as a mostly positively envisioned framework for economic growth, security and progress within Mongolia’s post-socialist transformation to neoliberal capitalism had significant social, political and ecological impacts on Khatgal. Under the precursor of nature conservation, Khatgal experienced a particular form of Mongolia’s post-socialist transformation that not only resulted in the abstraction of the Khövsgöl Dalai ecology, but also led to pollution and tense conviviality.