This paper will explore how early Lebanese nationalists constructed landscapes to signify an inclusive national ideal. I employ an environmental-historical analysis to consider how Lebanese industrialists and French Mandatory and commercial tourism operations contributed to the isolation and management of natural spaces in the service of a national environmental imaginary. This investigation focuses on the work of the New Phoenicians Charles Corm, Michel Chiha, and Jacques Tabet. These intellectuals and industrialists believed that modern Lebanese subjects were the direct descendants of the Phoenician empire. They argued for this identity with reference to an enchanted relationship with the Lebanese landscape, whose mountains and valleys ensured biological continuity. In 1920, these men formed the Touring-Club de Syrie et du Liban (TCSL), dedicated to the promotion of the tourism industry, the construction of roads, and protection and preservation of natural and archaeological sites. The TCSL operated in concert with many other tourism commissions and commercial enterprises in Lebanon and France. These organizations promoted tourism as a national activity, and touristic spaces as sites of national pilgrimage. However, the nation they articulated was fundamentally exclusive on class and linguistic boundaries. The tourism industry appealed to a European and Europeanized elite. This appeal was constructed through the projection of an image of “sameness” with France. This projection emphasized both Christian and Roman patrimony in the Levant and the environmental “sameness” of forested hills, reminiscent of southern France. Spaces that were well-known to readers of European travel literature, such as the Bcharré cedars and Baalbek, were made newly accessible to the urban elite and foreign tourists through the establishment of roads and a commercial tourism infrastructure. Simultaneously, new legal and material management practices made these spaces newly inaccessible to those rural inhabitants who had formerly lived or worked within them. My paper will consider the construction of this normative imaginary of Lebanese national space and argue that this environmental epistemology was violently exclusive. The process is ongoing, evident today in the painstaking reconstruction of Beirut’s Nejme square. This area is a symbol of the city and the country’s rehabilitation following the civil war, and it is wrapped in razor wire, managed and protected by the heavily-armed soldiers of Solidere.