Walled cities, ecocrisis, and totalitarianism: Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924) and J.J. Connington’s Nordenholt’s Million (1923)

This chapter examines two dystopian texts from the 1920s in order to explore some historical antecedents to the current climate crisis and to trace the emergence of anxieties about food production/sustainability and human populations. Examining Yevgeny Zamyatin’s seminal We (1924) alongside J.J.Connington’s Nordenholt’s Million (1923), an obscure but important contribution to twentieth-century dystopianism, this paper will examine the ways in which totalitarian regimes erect physical, ontological, and cultural borders and walls in response to social and environmental crisis. In We, Zamyatin’s highly mechanised, artificial, and technocratic city state is sealed from the external, ‘natural’ environment by a ‘green wall’, while its citizens (who have numbers rather than names) live in glass houses and are encouraged to have no barriers or individuality in relation to their fellow citizens. The ‘Mephi’ resistance is located beyond the city and seeks to restore humanity to its ‘natural’ behaviours by destroying One State and its environmentally-exploitative modes of production. In Nordenholt’s Million a proto-fascist leader responds to the death of vegetation by selecting productive citizens to live and work in a protected zone, while condemning the majority of the UK’s population to starvation outside the walls of the ‘Nitrogen Area’. Both novels are of obvious interest in the context of inter-war totalitarianism, but I situate them in relation to the interplay of social and environmental crisis during this period, the rise of ecological science, and Malthusian demographic debates. In pursuing an ecocritical reading of these texts (with some very brief nods to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World) I link inter-war contexts to current concerns about wall-building, climate change, and ecocrisis by suggesting a trajectory of Anthropocene anxieties.