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Salt the Earth
- 300 statements
- 56 feature instances
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Salting the earth is an act to curse the land and render fields incapable of crop growth, often used in ancient times as a symbolic act on top of various other scorched earth tactics to indicate the desire of the victor to completely eradicate the enemies' ability to reconstruct themselves after the war, or by those being forced into retreat to ensure that their would-be conquerors would have to put more effort into rehabilitating the land if they won. So as a trope, characters will often have an analogous action, sometimes literally salting the earth, which performs as a symbolic act to indicate their embrace of scorched earth tactics and the increase of hostilities beyond it. The act can be a movement across the Moral or Despair Event Horizons, increasing the threat of a character, making the stakes truly a matter of survival and making the lack of forgiveness or remorse clear. So it is that the act can occur at a pivotal moment in the middle of a war or as the final blow at the end of one. The action was common in the ancient Middle East and extended to the Middle Ages. The thing to note, though, is that salt was costly then. Wars and revolutions started because of it. Heck, even now a bad winter can give us difficulty in getting salt supplies out to spread on the roads. So in these tales, look at salt as not just something bad for the crops but also as something with attributed mystical powers and that you probably aren't going to spread over an entire field, leaving just the corner of some garden being ploughed for the symbolism of it. They knew their tropes, even then. Enough salt will decrease the fertility of the land. This was discovered first in Mesopotamia, when salts left from irrigation reduced fertility enough that whole civilizations collapsed. Unlike the symbolic versions practiced by the Romans, this involved centuries of salt deposits building up. In works set in the modern era, the equivalent is intentionally spreading radioactive material to render an area uninhabitable. The sci-fi version is "glassing" a planet, raining down enough Death from Above that there's nothing left of the surface but scorched glass. Related to Kill It with Fire and Death from Above. Compare There Is No Kill Like Overkill. Subtrope of Salt Solution. |
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| Salt the Earth / int_1077f3ae | type |
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In Triangle Strategy, the Falkes demesne has bountiful farmland... that the local lord, Landroi, burns to the ground so Aesfrost cannot make any use of it after their invasion. The burned-out farms can still be seen from the world map for the rest of the game. | |
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| Salt the Earth / int_13605458 | type |
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In Gate, after the Empire's disastrous and humiliating defeat against the JSDF in episode 2, where they lost over a hundred and twenty thousand men in a matter of days, the Emperor orders the regions surrounding their capital burned down to deny the JSDF resources and supplies they could gain from the regions. This tactic doesn't do anything to slow down the JSDF; since their control over the Gate allows them to have their own supplies shipped directly from Ginzanote A major shopping district in Tokyo that the other side of the Gate opens to: which is far larger than the Imperial Capital to the frontline, and that the JSDF can mobilize their forces more quickly due to their vehicles allowing them to travel faster through the damaged regions. All that the Emperor did was just make the peasants and surrounding townships hate the Empire even more for destroying their crops. | |
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In order to avoid getting involved in the Trojan War, Odysseus faked being insane and demonstrated this by tilling the land with salt. Palamedes then put Odysseus' son Telemachus in front of the plough and Odysseus stopped, ruining the ruse. | |
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The Simpsons: When Homer Simpson needed flowers for a parade float he took all of the ones from the Flanders garden. Flanders didn't really have a problem with this, but questioned the point of salting the soil so nothing would grow again. | |
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| Salt the Earth / int_3aabfec3 | comment |
In the Captain Planet and the Planeteers episode "Scorched Earth", the evil spirit Zarm possesses a dictator and implements a "Scorched Earth" policy against the rebels by blowing up oil refineries, which make flames that are almost impossible to put out and release toxic smoke. His general protests that the nearly irreversible damage to the environment is not worth it, but Zarm threatens to execute him for treason if he doesn't help. Zarm doesn't really care if his side wins; he just wants to cause as much suffering and destruction as possible. Fortunately, Captain Planet was able to put the flames out. | |
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| Salt the Earth / int_3ae518ad | type |
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| Salt the Earth / int_3ae518ad | comment |
In Idiocracy, this trope is not the result of malice, but stupidity. This happened because, at some point, a Gatorade ersatz called "Brawndo" got a law passed to replace all water with their sports drink under the reasoning that it has "electrolytes", which is "what plants crave". Since the electrolytes in sports drinks are dissolved salt, this has naturally led to a food crisis. It's likely that they would've starved to death if Joe hadn't come around and suggested they use water ("You mean from the toilet?"). On that note, Joe himself doesn't know what electrolytes are either: the film's narrator explains it to the audience. | |
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The city of Palestrina in the Papal States (now in Italy) revolted in the 1290s. When Pope Boniface VIII's forces defeated the rebellion, he ordered the city symbolically plowed and salted. This is one of several reasons Dante put Boniface in Hell. | |
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Neville Shute's 1957 novel, and subsequent 1959 movie, On the Beach, features the cobalt bomb (see below). | |
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Also in Sins of a Solar Empire, the Vasari Loyalist faction can survive without the need for planets as long as their rulership is intact; to that end, they have the ability to utterly annihilate planets that they colonize, rendering them virtually worthless for others to colonize long after they're gone. | |
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Knights of the Old Republic: Darth Malak launches an Orbital Bombardment of Taris, initially hoping to kill Jedi Knight Bastila Shan. It quickly stops being just about Bastila. Star Wars: The Old Republic has the Republic attempt to terraform and resettle Taris, only for the Sith to swoop in and poison the place even further and drive the Republic out just to piss them off. | |
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| Salt the Earth / int_56fa0ea4 | comment |
A common tactic in turn-based strategy games like Civilization is to send small armies to pillage improvements like farms and mines around the enemy cities, if you aren't strong enough or interested in actually capturing the territory. Not only does this put a dent in your enemy's production, but your citizens won't care what your army is doing, while the enemy's citizens will be angry with them, not you. | |
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In the Fallout: New Vegas DLC Honest Hearts, this is where the villain Salt-Upon-Wounds gets his name. Unsurprisingly, he was taught this tactic by Ulysses, a member of the Roman-inspired Caesar's Legion and Big Bad of the Lonesome Road DLC, who himself plans to nuke both NCR and Legion territory with the Divide's missiles. Dead Money's Big Bad, Father Elijah, plans to use the Cloud to render the Mojave uninhabitable. In the main game, one sidequest involves trying to stop a radiation leak that's poisoning a sharecropping operation. You can choose between stopping the leak but dooming the survivors of the vault it's coming from, or letting it remain while allowing the survivors to escape. |
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Schlock Mercenary: It's mentioned that this is a common side effect, both intentional and not, of nanny attacks. The nanites disassemble anything that comes into the area in order to make more nanites. It's common enough that it's specifically pointed out when this doesn't happen; Bunny deduces that a new type of nanites has hard-coded limits on lifespan and replication because the makers wanted a horrific anti-infantry weapon, not something that permanently denies the territory to everyone. | |
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In the first Tim Drake Robin miniseries, King Snake is convinced that when Hong Kong goes from British control to China (this was 1991) the Chinese will completely ruin the city. He thus decides to unleash a long-missing Nazi bio-weapon to wipe out Hong Kong and "spare" it Chinese rule. | |
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| Salt the Earth / int_6d04e064 | comment |
At the end of A Call to Arms, after the Drakh's plan to destroy the Earth is foiled, they release a Shadow engineered virus into the Earth's atmosphere that will kill all life on the planet in 5 years, which is explicitly compared to the Roman practice of poisoning wells. The search for the cure serves as the starting point of Crusade. | |
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The crew of Moya do something analogous in the season 1 finale of Farscape: exploding a ship in the atmosphere of a Peacekeeper moon, which ignites the moon's entire atmosphere. | |
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In the backstory of Vampire: The Masquerade, the vampires of Rome had the lands of Carthage salted to trap their enemies, who have become one with the earth to hide. | |
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The Cry of Mann: Courtney claims that she wants to destroy the house piece-by-piece, and then literally salt the ground so that nothing can ever grow on the land again, simply out of pure hatred for being there. | |
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Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: When the Federation is unable to hold the titular station against the Dominion and Cardassian forces, they evacuate it. As soon as they're gone, Kira Nerys activates a special program left by Sisko that destroys the station's computer systems, effectively crippling it for weeks. This denies the Dominion any intel, forces them to repair the station before taking down the mine field, and lets them flip off Dukat (arguably the most important reason to do so). The Cardassians trashed the station on their way out just before the beginning of the series, but didn't do nearly as thorough a job. They also exploited Bajoran resources extensively enough that there was famine when they left due to ruined potential farmland (probably on purpose). It's explicitly mentioned that they turned an entire peninsula (once the most fertile region on the planet) into a barren wasteland. In "For the Uniform", during the Maquis/Cardassian conflict, the Maquis decide to deal with the problem with a bioweapon that renders the target world unlivable for Cardassians, but fine for humans. Sisko responds by threatening to do the opposite to the Maquis-held worlds, and does so. In "What You Leave Behind", after the Cardassians pull a Heel–Race Turn in the Final Battle, the Female Changeling orders the extermination of the Cardassian species. This is stopped before being completed, but leaves Cardassia Prime devastated, just as they left Bajor. |
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As shown in the page image, the Covenant of Halo bombard human planets with plasma weaponry until the surface is fused into a glass-like mineral, hence the term "glassing". | |
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| Salt the Earth / int_7832b74c | comment |
Steven Universe: It's eventually revealed that the monsters the Crystal Gems are always fighting are actually their fellow Gems who were corrupted/mutated when the Diamond Authority did this. When it became clear that the war for Earth was lost, the Diamonds decided to just evacuate and then deploy a horrific sound-based Fantastic Nuke that warped the minds and bodies of any Gem caught in its range. Pearl, Garnet, Rose, and Bismuth are the only Crystal Gems who escaped this, as the former three were under a shield and the latter was in a Pocket Dimension (Amethyst was still in the ground and didn't emerge until later). In this case the native lifeforms and the planet itself were unharmed, but the basic intent was the same; the Diamonds felt that if they couldn't have Earth, than no one could. | |
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A specific recorded instance of this tactic is featured in Judges 9:45 — Abimelech conquered the city of Shechem and sowed it with salt. NIV translation: "All that day Abimelech pressed his attack against the city until he had captured it and killed its people. Then he destroyed the city and scattered salt over it." | |
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| Salt the Earth / int_7a0eb880 | comment |
In the Wing Commander novel Fleet Action, the Kilrathi build a fleet of super carriers and begin a seemingly inexorable push into human space. Along the way they bombard any human planets with Strontium-90 clad thermonuclear weapons that ensure that the planets will be uninhabitable. Even if the Kilrathi had succeeded, they would have gained little because they would have had no use for the conquered territory. Of course, this was precisely the point, and was the cause of an Enemy Civil War among the Kilrathi that ultimately prevented Earth from being obliterated. | |
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The Duchess intends to do this to parts of Lancre in Wyrd Sisters, seemingly For the Evulz. | |
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The Lord of the Rings: The Brown Lands, a withered expanse between Mordor and Mirkwood, had formerly been the richly cultivated abode of the Entwives. Sauron subjected them to a scorched earth campaign thousands of years ago in anticipation of the Last Alliance moving through the area on its way to invade his own realm, and they still haven't recovered. | |
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In Three Panel Soul Matt drops a match and some salt-shaker salt as he quits. It's done more in the spirit of the idea. | |
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In the Horus Heresy tabletop, the Dark Angels and Death Guard are both masters of the trope. The Dark Angels have the Dreadwing, a division of the legion that specializes in scorched-earth tactics. This is represented in-game by a Rite of War called the Eskaton Imperative that allows them to spam units with radiation grenades, phosphex bombs, flamethrowers with alchemical munitions, and plasma weapons (it even comes with a special rule called "Salt the Earth and Burn the Sky"). The Death Guard have all of those things turned up to 11, since chemical warfare is their specialty. The fluff specifically notes that both legions tend to leave a lot of scorched, dead worlds behind them. | |
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Book of the Dead (2021): When the Steelarms go after Mayor Janry's farm, in revenge for ordering them to hunt down Tyron, they don't just tear down the buildings until not a brick is left stacked on another; they also burn the fields until the ground itself is scorched, shatter the wells, kill all the animals, and carve up the soil "as if a giant ripped it up with his bare hands." They don't harm the people, though. | |
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In Total War: Warhammer this is the specialty of the Beastmen faction, who despise civilization. When they raze a city they can raise a crude monolith called a herdstone in its ruins. On top of pumping out chaos corruption to poison nearby lands it's impossible to resettle any ruins in the area until the herdstone is destroyed. A fully developed herdstone is the closest thing beastmen have to a city, a handful of tall stones infused with potent dark magic surrounded by hordes of mutants, at the center of an uninhabitable wasteland that sickens those who travel through it. | |
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Mentioned in passing in The Eagle of the Ninth, and downplayed a bit. The protagonist reflects that the arable land that has been ploughed with salt in reprisal for an attack on the local garrison will be useable again within a few years, but nothing can replace the dozens of young men killed in the fighting. | |
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A Song of Ice and Fire: Upon hearing Daenerys Targaryen's march to Meereen, the Great Masters salt the earth around the city to starve her army even if their conquest is successful. This ends up being the least of her problems, though, as she soon faces active rebellion from the former slave masters, a siege from Yunkai, and a dysentery plague. | |
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In The Ruins, the people guarding the titular ruins do in fact salt the earth around the pyramid. Very, very heavily, and for excellent reasons. Namely that the ruins hold man-eating vines, so they salt the earth around the pyramid in an attempt to keep the vines from spreading. It's unfortunate that they can't explain them. | |
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The Bible contains one of the first recorded laws of war that prohibit this. Specifically, it outlaws the then common practice of destroying forests and orchards to wreck the enemy's economy. A specific recorded instance of this tactic is featured in Judges 9:45 — Abimelech conquered the city of Shechem and sowed it with salt. NIV translation: "All that day Abimelech pressed his attack against the city until he had captured it and killed its people. Then he destroyed the city and scattered salt over it." |
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The Magic: The Gathering card Rain of Salt. Not to mention the much more literal Sowing Salt. |
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In Worldwar: War of Equals, the scorched earth tactic proves popular with the Italian military as they fall back from overrun areas. The Ukrainians later start utilizing the tactic as they retreat from Kiev. | |
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Game of Thrones. Lannister forces Rape, Pillage, and Burn the Riverlands in retaliation for their rebellion against King Joffrey. We get a close look at what's left afterward in Season 4 when Sandor Clegane and Arya Stark trek through it on their way to the Vale. | |
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Invader Zim: The Irkens employ a procedure called "Organic Sweep" in already conquered planets. It consists of their entire fleet bombarding the surface of the planet with everything they've got in order to destroy anything/anyone that might have survived the previous conquering. This leaves the empire's newest acquisition ready to be retrofitted as the Almighty Tallest see fit. | |
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In Shakespeare in Love, when the Rose is closed for having a woman onstage, Wessex threatens to have it dismantled stone by stone and the place where it was sown with quicklime. | |
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An extreme example would be Inquisitor Kryptman's strategy against Hive Fleet Leviathan. Since the Tyranids consume the bio-mass of any world they conquer to increase the size of their swarm, Kryptman ordered Exterminatus on the planets in the Hive Fleet's path, reducing them to lifeless husks. This succeeded in slowing the Tyranids' advance, but killed billions which had a disastrous effect on battlefield morale but more importantly cost the Imperium several inhabitable worlds, which are a lot harder to come by than a few million soldiers, and saw the Inquisitor excommunicated for his excesses. | |
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In the history of the High Elves of Warhammer, there was a civil war that split the nation. The point of no return when two different races would form came when a king whose family had been killed by the enemy moved to scorched earth tactics and would salt the fields of their lands on the continent, driving them onto a completely different land. | |
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This is a legitimate strategy in the Total War series. In the course of your imperial campaign, it's likely that you will come into the possession of cities that don't make strategic sense to hold, usually due to them being the fringes of your territory where corruption and unrest are the highest, requiring massive economic resources to upgrade, and/or requiring massive troop resources to defend. So once you've captured it, you can exterminate the populace, demolish all of the buildings, and even send in a plague-infected character to drive the population even further down. Then abandon it and allow it to rebel. It can provide a good buffer against enemy forces who, even if they capture it, won't get much use of out it. | |
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In Ancient Empires, Catapults can destroy houses, turning them into ruins. Ruined houses still give defense bonuses to units on them, but won't restore HP or produce gold. This fits the trope when a player does this to their own houses in advance of an enemy invasion. Enemy soldiers can capture houses for their own side, but if a house is destroyed they'll need to spend a turn repairing it first. | |
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Person of Interest: In the final three episodes, Finch steals and modifies a powerful computer virus in order to destroy Samaritan, but The Machine warns him about the devastating consequences its use will cause. Finch goes ahead with it, anyway. It's soon revealed that the virus will destroy The Machine as well as Samaritan. On top of that, once it actually launches, it winds up causing general global devastation that takes a full week to contain. | |
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Operation: Cinder, seen first in Star Wars: Shattered Empire then later in Star Wars Battlefront II (2017) was an attempt at this by Palpatine to his own empire. Operating on the logic of "If I can't rule the galaxy, no one can", imperial officers were given instructions by specially constructed messenger droids after the Emperor's death. Using various superweapons, they would render worlds throughout the Empire completely uninhabitable, ostensibly as a show of force. This wasn't just done to rebellious worlds, either. Two notable targets were Vardos, known for churning out loyal Imperial officers, and Naboo, Palpatine's home planet. | |
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This is essentially Fire Lord Ozai's plan during Sozin's Comet in Avatar: The Last Airbender. Tired of the Earth Kingdom not being oppressed enough, he intends to have a fleet of dirigibles carrying comet-enhanced firebenders burn the entire kingdom to the ground. Then again, given that he is insane, and his sadistic daughter gave him the idea, it's likely less "salt the Earth" and more "kill them all." | |
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In the backstory of TRON: Legacy, Clu poisoned the Simulation Sea to stop any new Isos from coming to life. Then he started his campaign of genocide against the rest. | |
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Discussed in Ahzirr Traajijazeri, the manifesto of a group of Khajiit revolutionaries. | |
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A tactic in Spore to destroy or capture an enemy colony is to use terraforming tools to reduce it to a lower T score. You can glass a planet if you really work at it. | |
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From the Trails Series is the Salt Pale disaster that ravaged the nation of North Ambria, which is a literal example of this trope. However, unlike most of these examples, this was a supernatural incident rather than the actions of a malicious person. Decades before the main plot begins, a giant pillar of salt descended from the skies, turning anything it touched into salt. This salt contaminated the soil of North Ambria, and also transformed any people it touched into salt. At the end of the three day disaster caused by the Salt Pale, a third of the country's population was killed, and the country's farmland was rendered useless, driving the country into perpetual poverty. In order to provide money for the people, the country's army converted into a jaeger corps, which are elite mercenaries in this world. | |
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The government's final disposition of The Initiative, in season 4 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Ironically a later episode shows the base is still intact albeit abandoned, so for some reason the order was never carried out. | |
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In Batman: No Man's Land, Bane plans to blow up Gotham's Hall of Records with low-yield nuclear bombs. He compares it to Rome's tactics, not only destroying the structure but poisoning the ground too. He did all this for Lex Luthor, to make it easier for him to acquire buildings when he has Gotham rebuilt. | |
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In the Star Wars Legends continuity, Tatooine was supposedly once a green and fertile planet, until its native population helped lead a Slave Revolt against the Rakatan Infinite Empire. In response, the Rakata bombarded the planet until its entire surface was glassed and its oceans boiled away. Over several millennia, the glass gradually broke down into sand, turning Tatooine into the desert world it is now. | |
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The theme song to Firefly uses it as a form of defiance. Their enemies can "burn the land and boil the sea," but they'll still have the sky. Mal's home planet, Shadow, was bombarded from space by The Alliance so badly that it was rendered completely uninhabitable. | |
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In Pacific Rim: Uprising, this is the Big Bad's goal: Kaiju blood reacts violently with rare earth elements, and if a Kaiju can throw itself into an active volcano rich in such elements (namely Mount Fuji), the reaction will blanket the earth in toxic fumes that would wipe out all life on the planet. | |
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In The Dragon King's Temple, Toph briefly mentions a time Aang put out a burning village with a flood of ocean water. The villagers chewed him out because the salt water ruined their crops. | |
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Babylon 5: In "Endgame", after it has become clear that President Clark's regime has been defeated by Sheridan's armada, before he is arrested, he sends the command to the defense satellites around Earth to fire at the planet itself, to wipe out most, if not all, of the people on it, before putting a bullet into his head. At the end of A Call to Arms, after the Drakh's plan to destroy the Earth is foiled, they release a Shadow engineered virus into the Earth's atmosphere that will kill all life on the planet in 5 years, which is explicitly compared to the Roman practice of poisoning wells. The search for the cure serves as the starting point of Crusade. |
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