Page 256 - The Power to Change Anything

Change the Environment 245

wouldn’t rot in the tropics. DuPont provided these fibers to a
company that does precision weaving, and they created the
material for the filters. DuPont then donated 2 million square
yards of this cloth to The Carter Center.
“This was the main resource we used to get rid of the
Guinea worm,” President Carter concluded.
Once the specialized cloth had been produced, the task of
getting people to filter their water was made a great deal eas-
ier, and with the help of that simple invention the parasite
began disappearing in hundreds of villages.
In India, there was an even more elegant engineering solu-
tion available than simply making it easy to filter the water
effectively. Unlike sub-Saharan Africa, in India clear, clean
water runs close to the surface of the earth. So engineers
drilled and capped bore-hole wells in hundreds of villages
across the country. This simple one-time strategy made safe
water far more accessible and bad water much harder to get to.
Guinea worm in India, robbed of its hosts, died off rapidly.
Much of Delancey’s success also depends on making the
right behavior easier while making the wrong behavior more
difficult. This is particularly true when it comes to drug abuse.
Imagine the challenge of ensuring that new residents succeed
during their first few drug-free weeks. Withdrawing from heroin
is described as one of the most excruciatingly painful trials you
can experience. Addicts who come to loathe the drug, and who
experience little benefit from the high after years of abuse, con-
tinue to use the drug just to avoid the pain of withdrawing.
And yet almost every heroin addict who comes to Delancey
makes it through this agonizing period. Why? In part because
they’ve changed their zip code. Minutes before walking
through the front gate, new residents’ environment had been
filled with people who used, supplied, or supported their addic-
tive behavior. Now they’re in a dorm with eight other people
who don’t. And outside the dorm are another 50 residents on
their floor who don’t. And in their building are another 200