I know how to cut down on mosquitoes in my yard. I already put vegetable oil in my bird bath but there are mosquitoes here that will hatch in the amount of water that is held in a fallen leaf. That is tough to combat but I was thinking about the salt marshes around Galveston Bay. That is a bit more than I can handle.
"That is tough to combat but I was thinking about the salt marshes around Galveston Bay"
Ya, that is a lot of oil :) Luckily you don't have to deal with Malaria.
I lived for a while on the coast of Nicaragua (AKA Mosquito Coast) Aedes aegypti is the carrier there and is a truly nasty little bugger. You will never get rid of all the mosquitoes, nor would you want to because in the process you would eradicate countless other insects that are beneficial, like honey bees for example. The thing about these diseases is that they are carried from one person to another and if you can limit the transmission in population centers the diseases burn out in those small regions. You will still get a case here and there, but not the major outbreaks.
Costa Rica is a good example, Although Malaria is endemic to the region, you rarely get many cases, while just over the border in Nicaragua it is still much more common. They (Costa Rica) have a very proactive education program where people go door to door during the rainy season and help you identify what you can do to reduce the breeding potential in your yard. You do this on the scale of towns and you see real result quickly. They still have a problem with dengue (think malaria "light") but it is rarely fatal unless you get the hemoragic type, but that is quite uncommon.
But back to the whole point of the post, trying to pin malaria to environmentalists, is a bad idea because it is so patently and provably absurd. There are so many pesticides available to kill mosquitoes that to try to claim the loss of DEET through some "EVIL" liberal plot just makes us all look like morons.