You cannot change the world

I have been studying the disappearance of malaria in Cyprus and Finland.

In Cyprus, this happened deliberately. In the 1940s, an island-wide campaign led by the Turkish Cypriot public health worker Mehmet Aziz set out to eliminate the mosquitoes transmitting malaria. Teams moved systematically across the island, searching houses, wells, streams and marshes. They found the water in which mosquitoes bred, treated it, and came back to check again.

The science mattered. But scientific knowledge did not walk from village to village. People did. Someone carried the equipment and sprayed the houses. Someone went back when the mosquitoes returned. Hundreds of people participated in making malaria disappear.

It is tempting to make the chemicals they used the important part of this story, but similar chemicals had been used elsewhere without eliminating malaria. Instead, what I keep finding in the archives and in people’s stories are dreams, dreams of a better life, of better working conditions, of a malaria-free island.

Finland had malaria control efforts too. Existing research suggests that these were not what made malaria disappear in the long run. Instead, the world around malaria changed. Housing, agriculture, patterns of movement and settlement changed. Society became more equal. Relations between people and between people, parasites and mosquitoes changed. Eventually the particular configuration in which malaria had reproduced itself came apart.

There is difference between the two places. They tell very different stories about how societies change. In Cyprus there was an organised attempt to make malaria disappear. In Finland it disappeared amid much broader transformations, themselves fought over politically across generations.

But during fieldwork in both places, I kept hearing a strangely similar sentence from scientists, farmers, teachers and more: “You cannot change the world.” This seemed odd. The history I was there to study suggested the opposite.

The world changes anyway

There is another strange thing about the statement “you cannot change the world”: the world so obviously changes. As I talked to people about this, I realised that many of those telling me the world could not be changed had actually tried to participate in its changing nature. But they had burnt out, punished or been disappointed. I sympathise with that. The harder question is how these consequences become something people can learn from, rather than proof that trying was a mistake.

I noticed something else. Participating in a changing the world does not require us to remain forever at the front of whatever struggle we once joined. This question of ‘getting out of the way’ has also started to mean something else in my research.

In Cyprus, attempts to break the malaria cycle were also part of a much longer history of trying to control water. Rivers were channelled. Wetlands were drained. Water was pushed away, contained or forced to move differently. Whilst they did not end malaria in Cyprus, these interventions are part of a contemporary legacy of an island with a broken water cycle.

So, what would changing that water-world mean now? Perhaps not to force water to do what we think it should. Some of the people I work with in Cyprus have instead pushed me towards listening to water: watching where it goes, understanding what happens when a river is allowed to be a river and asking how much work soils, wetlands and waterways can do themselves if get out of the way a bit.

After Malaria

This is one reason I called the project After Malaria. It is not a prediction that malaria will soon disappear everywhere. Cyprus and Finland certainly do not give us a model that can simply be exported elsewhere, although I think they do offer many lessons. I am interested in something simpler.

We spend a great deal of time studying problems that appear immovable. What happens if we also start from places where something once treated as an ordinary part of life stopped being ordinary? Malaria had been part of life in Cyprus and Finland for centuries. Then it wasn’t.

When somebody tells me that we cannot change the world, I think of stories of malaria from Cyprus and Finland, because people already did. The After Malaria project is simply doing the homework so as to remind us of that public health heritage, what it depends on, and just maybe inspire us to recognise our power, for better or worse.