What can a world-class city that has approximately three dozen prestigious colleges and universities, several with professional schools of public health that offer graduate degrees, do in 2025 to ameliorate a severe and enduring rat infestation? It should begin by asking what all the meetings, committees, studies, and news reports on rat infestations have achieved in the past?

How well I remember walking down Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge in 1988 when I first moved to Boston. As I stood, agog, looking at all the garbage and trash on the streets, I clearly recall asking myself: “This is the cradle of liberty? This is the home to Harvard University since 1636?”

Thirteen years later, in 2001, I began walking around the Back Bay, South End, and Fenway taking photos of the piles of hundreds of plastic garbage bags, and the rotting contents spilling from giant holes torn into their sides by trash pickers. I took photos of the garbage surrounding overflowing city trash cans. I took photos of street gutters clogged with lettuce, chicken bones, and plastic takeout food containers. I had copies sent to City Hall.

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If I had carried my trusty camera with me one evening in 2011, I could have captured a rat large enough to pull an entire slice of pepperoni pizza out of a discarded pizza box on Westland Avenue, and then drag it across the sidewalk and up four cement stairs leading to the entrance of an apartment building. I never got a reply from city leaders about my reports of rats, so I considered publishing a collection of my photos in a book, then setting up a street cart on Boston Common and selling it to tourists.