Plants' Rights
By CLAY RISEN
In September, Ecuador vaulted to the forefront of international eco-politics when it became the first country to extend constitutional rights to nature. Approved by nearly 70 percent of voters, the Andean republic's new Constitution grants nature “the right to the maintenance and regeneration of its vital cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes.” The precise scope of nature's rights is unclear. Referring to Pachamama, an indigenous deity whose name roughly translates as “Mother Universe,” the text puts less emphasis on defending specific species than on the rights of ecosystems writ large. And it is uncertain how, exactly, a country as poor as Ecuador can protect those rights — though observers expect to see a raft of new lawsuits against oil and gas companies.
Even so, it is a milestone for environmental organizations that seek to rewrite our treatment of nature. In fact, one such group, the Pennsylvania-based Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, helped draft the new protections in the Ecuadorean Constitution. The C.E.L.D.F. posits that most laws define nature as someone's property, forcing environmentalists to prove extensive damage before regulations can be put in place. A rights-based approach, it argues, reverses that burden, putting the health of ecosystems first.
Ecuador isn't alone in elevating the sanctity of nature: this year, the Spanish Parliament granted the right to be spared “abuse, torture and death” to great apes, and an ethics panel appointed by the Swiss Parliament called for protecting plants' “reproductive ability.” As a consequence, Swiss researchers must now apply for approval before conducting scientific research on even the smallest of flora. Ecuador's new Constitution may go much further, arguably granting broad protections to simple life forms like algae and even bacteria. After all, who knows what they might evolve into?
Polling Aggregation
By CHRISTOPHER HAYES
Back in 2002, the Web site Real Clear Politics made itself indispensable to political junkies when it came up with its “poll of polls,” a feature that averaged all the most recent polling of that year's Senate and gubernatorial campaigns. That way, readers could get a sense of a race at a glance without having to make decisions about whom to trust. “It's kind of like your wisdom-of-the-crowd notion,” says David Moore, a critic of the industry and a former Gallup pollster. “Sure, you're going to get a lot of bad ones, but hopefully the bad ones will be just as wrong in one direction as they are in the other and will cancel each other out.”
This year, two sites expanded on R.C.P.'s simple notion. Pollster.com provided aggregate polling data for the most contested states, while FiveThirtyEight.com, founded by a baseball-stats wunderkind, Nate Silver, employed a sophisticated model that weighted the reliability of different polls as well as factoring in the demographics and voting history of each state. The results were impressive. Silver's final prediction of 52.3-46.2 Obama over McCain was pretty darn close to 52.8-45.9, the actual final tally. At the state level, Pollster.com fared similarly, with an average margin of error of just 1.6 percent in the heavily polled battleground states.
Has the surprise election result become a quaint historical artifact? In fact, averaging polls only works if the pollsters' errors really do cancel one another out. This didn't happen in the New Hampshire Democratic primary, where Pollster.com's final average had Obama beating Clinton by more than seven points, when he in fact lost to her by two and a half. There's also the problem that most races don't produce enough polling to allow the magic of aggregation to do its work. This year was possibly the most polled in human history, but in local races, or most off-year Congressional contests, we'll still have to settle for the same maddening fluctuations. Which might be good for election addicts who, after all, still need something to obsessively worry about.
Positive Deviance
By JON GERTNER
For the past few years, Jerry and Monique Sternin have been working with hospitals around the country to reduce the spread of a hospital-borne infection known as M.R.S.A. The Sternins take an unorthodox approach to problem-solving known as positive deviance, or P.D., which builds on years of their health work in poor countries in Southeast Asia.
A P.D. program aims to identify individuals within small communities who have devised clever coping strategies to avoid problems afflicting their neighbors. “Instead of going into a village and looking at the 70 percent of malnourished kids, P.D. flips it around,” explains Jerry Sternin, who ran the Positive Deviance Initiative at Tufts University until his death in December 2008. “There are 30 percent who are not malnourished — same socioeconomic status, same risk, but they're not in trouble. Why?” Understanding precisely what the 30 percent are doing differently, and then encouraging these positive deviants to educate the other 70 percent, can effect significant changes in group behavior.
The M.R.S.A. hospital work takes a similar bottom-up approach. In a recent P.D. program at the V.A. hospital in Pittsburgh, run with the help of the Plexus Institute, the staff suggested and then adopted a range of hygienic rules that included room-cleaning checklists and disposable slipcovers for Bibles. The M.R.S.A. infection rate at the hospital dropped by 50 percent in a year, says Jon Lloyd, a retired surgeon who helped implement the program there. Moreover, he notes, the positive-deviant behaviors arose from lower-level employees like janitors and cooks as well as doctors and nurses.
Likewise, in the spring, a nurse at the Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia noticed that an orderly named Jasper Palmer had choreographed a safe and ingenious method for removing an M.R.S.A.- exposed hospital gown and sealing it inside his latex gloves (watch the video at positivedeviance.org). Without the hospital's P.D. initiative, the Palmer Method, as it's now known, might have been overlooked as eccentricity rather than innovation. It's a modest bit of proof that we might do well to solve problems by thinking about how we act, Sternin remarks, rather than acting upon how we think.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 13, 2008
An article on page 68 of The Magazine this weekend about innovations in health care sponsored by the Positive Deviance Initiative at Tufts University reports on the institute and its director, Jerry Sternin, and includes his detailed description of the initiative's work. Mr. Sternin died on Thursday, after the magazine had gone to press.