Land of Milk and Honey draws on the genre of ecological dystopias. Traditional dystopias, such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), are set in the future, feature evil societies run by malignant governments, and reflect mid-20th-century anxieties about totalitarianism by demonstrating the horrors of a society controlling the lives of individual citizens.

During the second half of the 20th century, the development of critical theory, environmental science, and Cold War anxieties led to the expansion of dystopia. Dystopias from the 1950s, such as Walter M. Miller’s Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), center the aftereffects of nuclear war.

As nonfiction works such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) began to critically examine how governments, especially the US government, harmed the environment for chemical company profits, these concerns appeared in speculative fiction such as Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965), which depicts an empire stripping a planet of its resources, rendering its environment uninhabitable and thus destroying the Indigenous culture.