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Abstract Despite the influence of neo-Malthusian thinking in international development and environmental policy during the mid twentieth century, this story is often told from a US-centered perspective, with population control policies seen to roll out from the world geopolitical centers to the 'Global South' via the influence of large development institutions. Latin American perspectives on the population control question are seldom considered, except to suggest that the Catholic Church provided consistent, organized opposition to the expansion of family planning services. In this paper, using an political-intellectual history approach, I explore how the population question intersected with interrelated development issues in Latin America in the first half of the twentieth century: health and nutrition, food and agriculture, rural livelihoods, economic dependency, and women's rights. I focus on the relationship between public health crises and pro-natalist policies; the influences of the eugenics movement in supporting national population growth as a biopolitical strategy; anarcho-feminist thought that stressed the emancipatory potential of fertility control and new social roles for women; the Brazilian Josué de Castro's research on the causes of famine and malnutrition, which took a structuralist approach and explicitly rejected neo-Malthusian and other environmentally determinist approaches to understand the causes of poverty and hunger; and Latin American engagements with the international family planning and population control agenda in the 1960s. With this history in mind, we can trace alternative intellectual roots of political ecology's critique of neo-Malthusianism and other deterministic environment-development theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting in the 1930s, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) created a globally influential model of regional development through centralized planning of massive public works to re-engineer social and natural systems in impoverished areas. TVA invested heavily in malaria control, since its own reservoirs created perfect breeding grounds for malaria-carrying anopheles mosquitoes. Eventually, both the TVA and malaria control would become key elements in an influential metanarrative in which an American ideology of 'technological modernism' dominated international development in the post-World War II era, until modern environmentalism and other social movements undermined the assumptions and goals of this ideology. This paper argues that a more subtle understanding of the history of ecological thought in regional development and malaria control challenges the dominant metanarrative. TVA malaria control actually reflected a tension between two important and competing ideological threads of TVA's master ethos of integrated regional development: socio-ecological holism and techno-scientific reductionism. Socio-ecological holism provided the grand vision for a transformation of nature and society, conceived as a unitary whole. But it was techno-scientific reductionism, which accommodated intimate, ecologically grounded knowledge of the habitats and behaviors of anopheles mosquitoes, that made malaria control possible. In this way, the TVA experience reflected theory and practice in malaria control internationally, before the advent of DDT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Grand Prairie of east central Illinois was notorious for a marshy environment that prevented dense agricultural settlement until late in the nineteenth century. While recent historical-geographical scholarship has focused on innovations in drainage technology, drainage-related laws and institutions, and the ecological impacts of wetland reclamation, it has largely failed to account for the persistence of agrarian structure, and its key component, land tenure, on the Grand Prairie. Late-nineteenth-century reclamation efforts were not quite so transformative as previously believed. The same landed elite that dominated in the pre-drainage era quickly emerged atop a system of public drainage that held the key to the region's economic future. In this paper, we extend Karl Wittfogel and Donald Worster's theorizations about 'hydraulic civilizations' from the realm of irrigation to that of drainage. While drainage was indeed important in shaping the history of east central Illinois, we argue that a distinctive social order in east central Illinois emerged from, and was shaped by, an older agrarian structure that had developed in response to marshy, unpredictable conditions before drainage began in the late 1800s. The beneficiaries of the old order did not yield power easily, and instead skillfully capitalized on the new opportunities presented by drainage enterprises, to create a 'hydraulic society' on the prairie. The new order continued to rely on the exploitation of tenant farmers even as the landscape itself was transformed into the intensely managed and highly productive Corn Belt of today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This study traces the evolution of social–environmental models of malaria control in Northwest Argentina. Beginning in the 1890s, the rationale for malaria control hinged on a narrative that placed malaria as the root cause of the Northwest''s chronic backwardness. Insalubrious rural and urban landscapes, underutilized agricultural potential, unproductive labor, and even racial decay were all bound together as a public health problem. The framework for understanding malaria in the environment was derived from miasmatic theory and medical geography, anchoring the disease firmly in particular landscapes. Wetlands, representing both economic waste and a public health hazard, were singled out as targets for reclamation. Thus ‘environmental sanitation’ techniques, especially wetland drainage, became the preferred strategy for the federal government''s malaria campaign, initiated in 1907. The ‘socio-ecological’ orientation of the Italian malaria campaign under Fascism, in which large-scale wetland reclamation for malaria control seemed to produce a comprehensive transformation of rural land and life, had a strong influence in Argentina, further entrenching environmental sanitation methods. By the 1930s, however, it became apparent that Italy''s wetlands served poorly as landscape analogues for Argentina''s Northwest. In particular, the main mosquito vector in the region turned out not to be a stereotypical ‘swamp breeder,’ rendering pointless most wetland drainage efforts. A counter-model, which adopted the framework of ecological science, proved to be more sensitive to the behaviors and microenvironments of different mosquito species, while disentangling malaria control from the broader and mostly unrealistic social development goals of the older model. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]