History Main / SaltTheEarth

* This is China's cup of tea when it comes to the South China Sea/West Philippine Sea/Sea of Asia, because they hate the idea of other neighboring nations sharing territories with one another, they will often construct artificial island and cause lots of environmental destruction so that their neighbors will have to put a ''lot'' of effort to reconstructing the region again.

* A ''Franchise/StarTrek'' novelization set in an AU where Earth has made itself reviled and loathed by the rest of the Galaxy has the Klingons doing this to an entire planet in vengeance and to make an emphatic point to humanity. As it necessarily takes time to do this to a whole planet [[note]]they elect to wreck the climate pattern of the planet by various high-tech means, including evaporating the Great Lakes to make North America a wasteland[[/note]] the surviving human population has a traumatic and unpleasant lingering death.

* The infamous [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hama_massacre Hama massacre of 1982]], where the [[UsefulNotes/{{Syria}} Syrian]] army besieged the city for 3 weeks, killing somewhere between 17,000 and 40,000 people. It's widely considered the MoralEventHorizon for the Ba'ath Party and Hafez al-Assad.

* In the backstory for ''[[Fanfic/StarWarsVsWarhammer40K Star Wars vs. Warhammer 40K]]'', the Imperium of Man was forced to evacuate the entire Xek-Tek Sector in anticipation of an incoming Tyranid Hivefleet tendril and an upcoming slave raid by Drukhari pirates. After they were finished evacuating the populations of each world, the Imperials razed every planet they had in the sector to deny the enemy whatever resources remained.

-->-- '''Marshal Graziani''', ''Lion of the Desert'' (1981)

* A predecessor to modern "scorched earth" policies is the French concept of the ''chevauchée'', which involved burning and pillaging an area instead of facing defending armies head-on, so they could affect an area's productivity. It was particularly popular with England during UsefulNotes/TheHundredYearsWar, who conducted several in the first half of the war. King Edward III, his son Edward the Black Prince (Prince of Wales ''and'' Aquitaine),[[note]]Prince Edward would be a thorn in France's side for quite a bit of the Early English peaks of the war, but had to return to England due to illness, and ultimately pre-deceased his father.[[/note]] and King Henry V all made effective use of the strategy, though it died out after the war. Even before that, William the Conqueror likely used this tactic against rebels in Northumbria during the "Harrying of the North" in 1069 and 1070, though in that case it was because the rebels refused to face him in battle. This practice reached its logical (and [[WarIsHell horrifying]]) conclusion in the UsefulNotes/ThirtyYearsWar where this kind of RapePillageAndBurn mentality combined with fueled a war that literally lasted [[ForeverWar 30 years]] [[note]]Other "X years war" like the Hundred and UsefulNotes/TheEightyYearsWar had lulls in the fighting[[/note]] and killed off around a third [[note]]Some regions going as far as two thirds[[/note]] of the UsefulNotes/HolyRomanEmpire. For comparison, one of the region hit the worst by UsefulNotes/WorldWarII was UsefulNotes/{{Belarus}}, at one quarter dead.