“Poo” York City’s Tragedy of the Commons

Having survived an eternal winter, New Yorkers step gingerly out-of-doors into the hope of spring, where March snowmelt reveals an urban pastiche of Jackson Pollack-like flows of dog excrement. “Eyes down!”, instructs my daughter on our walk to school. “Look out!”

Nimble attentiveness does not defeat the accumulated obstacles. Civic disgust unfurls: How is so much poop on the sidewalks?, which is to say, on our minds as well as our shoes?

The causes of this undignified situation are not complex. Months of snow and darkness meant that canine-caretakers who braved the wintry mix were hooded, huddled, and surrounded by towers of ice, snow, and trash — and thus had some degree of anonymity when they left dog poop on frozen sidewalks. Perhaps they even gained a kind of utility, or at least avoided disgust, by leaving their four-legged friends’ steaming excrement behind.

This is an everyday example of the “tragedy of the commons,” a contested concept popularized in 1968 by ecologist Garrett Hardin. In an article in Science, Hardin claimed that population density and self-interested use of shared resources will lead to strife and disaster. (His examples included rural sheep grazers and waste disposal, but New York city dog owners and canine poop arguably fit the bill.)

In Hardin’s view, the “individual benefits as an individual from his ability to deny the truth” of collective obligation. As a result, the commons are depleted and polluted, and “society as a whole…suffers.” In other words: while some individuals benefit from failing to pick up and dispose of their dogs’ poop, the rest of us bear the burden by hopscotching around city sidewalks and scraping poop off our shoes.

Hardin’s culturally universalizing assumption of solely self-interested rational-choice actors has been challenged by political ecologists. But this is New York City, after all.

So let’s keep our eyes on the sidewalks.

My anecdotal observations reveal a stunning variety of scat. Some mounds of poop were briefly frozen but, in the relative warmth of March, now begin to melt at the edges — leaving small tendrils of dissolved feces to flow downhill. On the Upper East Side, well-heeled dogs that lunch on salmon presumably emit smoother piles than their grittier downtown neighbors. Still other bundles of scat are tightly balled — taupe in color, feathered in texture — and appear almost fossilized after being frozen in ice for months.

Let’s be clear: the dogs are not morally blameworthy, since (as best we know) they don’t understand themselves as rational animals and can’t avail themselves of New York City’s admirable sanitation infrastructure. Most dog owners are responsible bipeds and denizens of this densely-populated city who rightly pick up their dogs’ solid waste. (On behalf of all New Yorkers, I salute you.)

Yet for the remaining few, Hardin’s maxims arguably hold true:

The rational man finds that his share of the cost of the wastes he discharges into the commons is less than the cost of purifying his wastes before releasing them. [And thus] we are locked into a system of “fouling our own nest,” so long as we behave only as independent, rational, free-enterprisers.

Leaving poop behind is not ethical, even amidst the snow and ice — and certainly not once the thaws are upon us. To be sure, stalwart defenders of libertarian self-determination will impugn my suggestion of communitarian morality. Others may wax entrepreneurial: does not that speckled river of melting poop represent an unparalleled opportunity for lessons in urban ecology? So much the better if it abuts city schools!

But the majority grows weary of this tragedy.

Perturbed parents, commuters, groundskeepers, superintendents, and wearers of high-heels rage against this particular form of disdain for the commons. Consider, for example, the middle school official in my borough who has staked out a rooftop vantage point from which to get a visual on any ongoing offenders. Or the parent who yesterday growled: “I am one poop-shoe away from rigging up video surveillance to catch these people.” In some locales, the tragedy of the canine commons translates into one woof for the surveillance state (the city of Naples, Italy opted for DNA testing of urban dog poop in order to identify persistent offenders).

Steady scatological evidence impels us to school our moral sensibilities anew. Instead of living in what the kids are calling “Poo” or “Ew” York, let’s enact our better natures — and avoid the tragedy of the canine commons, one sidewalk at a time.

The poop may be hard frozen, but New Yorkers’ hearts don’t have to be.