Geoengineering with Shovels

Mosquitoes, megaprojects, and the New Deal’s least-remembered public health initiative

Published by Do Not Research, this essay recovers one of the New Deal’s least-remembered megaprojects: the vast, shovel-dug drainage campaigns waged against malaria’s mosquitoes. Landscape-scale engineering carried out by hand, it reframes what “geoengineering” meant before the word existed — and what public health infrastructure once looked like.