The Department of Nature is a federal ministerial department with the following missions:
- Protecting Oceanyka's natural resources from overexploitation, most importantly its game, forests and fisheries.
- Tracking the population and health of Oceanyka's flora, fauna and the status of its natural habitats.
- Monitoring the nation's water resources and its agricultural soils.
- Prevent and respond to large-scale environmental disasters which threaten to destroy vast swathes of the nation's ecosystems.
For these missions the Department of Nature has two forces at its disposal: the Armed Conservation Service and the National Volunteer Firefighter Corps. Its head is the Minister of Nature, aided by a number of academics and associates, primarily from the Department of Knowledge and its University of Cestlep.
Not many people like this ministerial department. At the very least one person at any given room has had a violent encounter with Oceanyka's notoriously deadly natural environment, even if that room only has one person in it. However, the 1961 Federal Audit shone light on a unique phenomena of the mid-1960s: Oceanyka's declining ecosystems. Humanity's technological advances, coupled with explosive growths in both population and economy over the 20th century, have finally begun turning the tide against the Australian Gaia, a warrior queen more than a motherly figure. Both of the Department of Nature's two first missions are the responsibility of its Armed Conservation Service, perhaps the world's most trigger-happy park rangers. Another of the DoN's tasks, and perhaps the most daunting, is preventing and responding to large-scale ecological disasters (primarily bushfires) through its National Volunteer Firefighter Corps. Finally, this Department is also tasked with monitoring the status of Oceanykas's acquifers, rivers, lakes and the health of its soils. In this aspect it has found little work, as the ecosystem continues to be as lush and indifferent to human attempts to exploit it as always, though some caution has been offered in certain regions.