The proposed paper links nature and its destruction to identity politics in the context of the Saudi nation state and oil industry. It is based on field research in 2012 and 2013 as well as on a study of archival documents, local historiography, artistic productions and social media. The case study focusses on the natural environment of the oasis of Qatif in the oil rich Eastern province, with whom the local communities interact in different ways, including cultivating, extracting from, defending against, and giving meaning to. The paper echoes the notion of nature as “ethnoscape”, i.e. “understandings of nature as a lived-in landscape of labor and as a reservoir of cultural, religious, and historical meanings.” It will be argued that, in the sense of Manuel Castells' seminal classic "The Power of Identity" (1997), the construction of a collective identity by the local communities draws on – amongst others – locality, and especially on the forfeit oasis environment. In the times preceding the present Saudi state and oil industrialization, the natural bounty of the oasis stood metaphorically for the ancient civilizing culture of Qatif. Past local discourse contrasted the paradisal oasis environment with the scarce and hostile desert that surrounds it. This changed in the course of the 20th century, when encroachment by the Saudi state and by oil modernization projects led to profound changes in local land regimes and in the physical appearance of the oasis. In the process, local nature increasingly gained meaning as resource which needed to be preserved and defended against economic and political interests from the outside. Thus, the implicit notion of belonging gained an important new aspect besides cultural attachment by birth, descent, tradition and economic dependency: the aspect of rightful ownership. Today, local activists and artists perceive the destruction of the oasis as irrecoverable loss of their homeland and as their gradual erasure from the political and cultural maps of the Saudi state. Nature’s attributions of purity and morality furthermore point at an intellectual tradition which adds a religious connotation to collective identity in Qatif.