@article{dc48af8178024ff5b550cbf6cb65294c,
title = "A Bug's Life and the Spatial Ontologies of Mosquito Management",
abstract = "This article uses the theory of Gilles Deleuze to address the disjuncture between (1) the mechanical, chemical, and thermal processes of transduction that determine the biogeographical life of the mosquito; and (2) the spatialities of historic and contemporary management strategies. The history of mosquito management reveals two operative spatial ontologies, one an immanent horizontalism underwriting an intimate strategy of detection and destruction of breeding sites, the other a transcendent verticalism appropriate for the partitioning of space in support of widespread chemical spraying of adult populations. We find that two institutions in contemporary, mosquito-rich Arizona-the Pima County Health Department and Maricopa County Vector Control-are representative of this split in management. In this article we attempt to account for the observed interagency differences. Doing so, we suggest, requires an assemblage theory that brings together managers, institutions, and sociocultural-environmental-technological-political contexts with the flights of the mosquito itself.",
keywords = "Assemblage theory, Deleuze, Integrated vector management, Mosquito, Spatial ontology",
author = "Shaw, {Ian Graham Ronald} and Robbins, {Paul F.} and Jones, {John Paul}",
note = "Funding Information: This research was supported by the National Science Foundation{\textquoteright}s Geography and Spatial Sciences Program (award number 0617953). Thanks to the grant{\textquoteright}s coprincipal investigators, Andrew Comrie and Eilizabeth Willott, both of the University of Arizona. A portion of Jones{\textquoteright}s effort was supported by the UK Economic and Social Research Council in conjunction with the Centre for Civil Society at the London School of Economics. The authors would also like to thank the journal{\textquoteright}s reviewers and Eric Carter for their comments and assistance. Additional thanks to organizers and audiences at 2009 presentations of the Association of American Geographers, the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers, the Arizona Department of Health Services annual Vector-Borne Zoonotic Disease Conference and Workshop, and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Finally, we also acknowledge the assistance of Craig Levy of the Arizona Department of Health Services and the cooperation of staff at Maricopa County Vector Control and the Pima County Health Department. Funding Information: complete eradication of a malaria-carrying African import, Anopheles gambiae, from northeast Brazil in the late 1930s. Like Gorgas, Soper was given the authority of martial law for his efforts, opening all forms of private property to his then-preferred insecticide, Paris Green, or copper acetoarsenate. Soper secured his reputation as the world{\textquoteright}s insect killer (Gladwell 2001), however, when he mobilized the large-scale industrial production of dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane, or DDT, during and following World War II. He discovered its value in killing lice and its associated typhus bacteria in Algeria and Italy, where applications to clothing and bedding were said to have greatly aided in the war effort. Soper{\textquoteright}s successes set a new historical standard for zero tolerance, or “species sanitation” (Spielman and D{\textquoteright}Antonio 2001, 147). In focusing on the widespread application of agents, outdoor as well as indoor,7 rather than the elimination of breeding sites, the contrast between Gorgas and Soper is sharpened. As Gladwell (2001, 44) put it, “Gorgas, Soper{\textquoteright}s legendary predecessor, said that in order to fight malaria, you had to learn to think like a mosquito. Soper disagreed. Fighting malaria, he said, had very little to do with the intricacies of science and biology.”8 Soper{\textquoteright}s doctrine led to the worldwide application of DDT in the 1950s and 1960s, under the banner of the Global Malaria Eradication Program. In part funded by the U.S. government and carried out through the United States Agency for International Development, as well as the World Health Organization and other agencies, the program was a public health effort cum geopolitical strategy, as U.S.-manufactured and labeled agents were distributed throughout the tropics. DDT is credited with having saved millions of lives. As chemical controls came to virtually eliminate malaria everywhere outside of Africa, officials across the globe had reason to believe that mosquito-transmitted diseases would soon become relics of the past (Townson et al. 2005). It was not long before the mosquito began to develop resistances, however, first in Sardinia and then in Greece, both of which saw insect populations rebound after extensive aerial spraying. The 1962 publication of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson documented the detrimental effects of DDT, and the compound was eventually banned a decade later in the United States. Although DDT is still in use in a handful of countries, in most places it has been replaced by ultralow-volume (ULV) insecticides, usually delivered by sprayers mounted on trucks or aerial vehicles. These solutions from the road and sky are able to cover vast geographic areas, dispersing chemical residues across patchworks of jurisdictional boundaries and pockets of ecological singularity.",
year = "2010",
month = apr,
doi = "10.1080/00045601003595446",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "100",
pages = "373--392",
journal = "Annals of the Association of American Geographers",
issn = "0004-5608",
publisher = "Taylor and Francis Ltd.",
number = "2",
}