Ecocide, or environmental destruction, and the attack on culturally significant buildings, have been highlighted as purposeful elements in wartime tactics, quite different from the impact of collateral damage. Military commanders have indeed, for centuries, deliberately targeted the environment of their enemies. We may now be witnessing the beginnings of large-scale environmental stresses, such as water shortages, which may play an important role in the causes of war. But another form of wartime environmental impact has been less studied: the transformation of landscapes to meet emergency needs of food. By late 1939 British preparations for a siege economy propelled the countryside into greater productivity for human food, aiming to divert shipping away from food imports to the machinery and munitions of war. Such emergency strategies took immediate precedence over the fledgling rural amenity, planning and aesthetics movements. A ‘sliding scale theory’ argues that, as military necessity grows during wartime, so peacetime environmental norms of protection must reduce.

Certainly in wartime the overriding need was for all the nation’s resources to be mobilised, and nature was part of that process. The British state redoubled its efforts in shaping and exploiting its environment – a humanly shaped world, given centuries of domestication, but at least perceived by many as a pleasing ‘natural’ scene. The reality of this situation was complex. On the one hand ‘nature’ might be portrayed as an enemy, to be subdued, coerced, transformed, but on the other it was also enlisted as an ally. If nature played a large role in shaping national narratives about people and places, it was also shaped by those same narratives. It was now important to demonstrate that the British nation was a community, and visions of ‘our’ nature were used to build that national wartime identity. The White Cliffs of Dover were just one example of a symbolic nature in wartime. Nature was to be appropriated to the national cause.