![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I'm writing this from a new apartment, but in the same apartment complex where I was before. The landlords required that I move out of my old unit so maintenance could rip out the living-room ceiling, which is filled with asbestos and has been covered with mold for most of the last six weeks. I'm now wondering whether I should have decided to end my lease, pay the early termination fee, and move somewhere else entirely. Maybe there wasn't enough time. Maybe the costs would have outweighed the risks of continuing to live in these poorly-built structures. Then again, maybe not.
It all started about two months ago, when I noticed a small damp spot in my bedroom ceiling.( The gory details... )
From that point (March 6th), it took the landlords three and a half weeks to make a final decision to move me out. But when they finally did so, they wanted to move with some haste--an emergency transfer, they called it.( More gory details )
My new unit is much larger than the old one and has its own washer-dryer unit, but it's on the first floor instead of the third, which means I get footsteps overhead but am not immune from roof leaks, as I learned shortly before I moved.( Even more gory details ) I'm left wondering if this or a similar disaster will happen to me in the nine months before my lease term is up. (UPDATE: It did. One fine evening, the bathtub in the unit above me started leaking onto the floor of my bathroom, and I had to hold back the water with a dam made of towels while waiting for the guy with the water extraction machine to show up. He told me that he has to use it about twice a week in this apartment complex.) (UPDATE 2: I have now moved to a new complex with no asbestos in the ceilings and no record of recent water leak incidents. It's substantially more expensive and the road outside my window is noisy, but I don't care.)
So what's the metaphor here? Well, the opposite of a global-warming skeptic is someone so obsessed with the climate crisis that he/she focuses on fixes that are too specific to just that crisis (e.g. the Richard Branson prize for figuring out how to pull a billion tons of carbon out of the atmosphere per year). Such a person ignores the fact that an unsustainable civilization such as ours will inevitably continue to produce such existential crises. We need to "move out" of this way of life and into one based wholly on technologies and behaviors that don't undermine our own resource base, destroy ecosystem services, etc. The landlady may give us a few more decades to make that move, but we had better not get too sidetracked by short-term fixes that might let us cling to business as usual for a little while longer. As shown on the diagram on the sixth slide of Paul Ray's presentation for the State of the World Forum, relying on such fixes to save us will probably just lead to a slow death for civilization.
It all started about two months ago, when I noticed a small damp spot in my bedroom ceiling.( The gory details... )
From that point (March 6th), it took the landlords three and a half weeks to make a final decision to move me out. But when they finally did so, they wanted to move with some haste--an emergency transfer, they called it.( More gory details )
My new unit is much larger than the old one and has its own washer-dryer unit, but it's on the first floor instead of the third, which means I get footsteps overhead but am not immune from roof leaks, as I learned shortly before I moved.( Even more gory details ) I'm left wondering if this or a similar disaster will happen to me in the nine months before my lease term is up. (UPDATE: It did. One fine evening, the bathtub in the unit above me started leaking onto the floor of my bathroom, and I had to hold back the water with a dam made of towels while waiting for the guy with the water extraction machine to show up. He told me that he has to use it about twice a week in this apartment complex.) (UPDATE 2: I have now moved to a new complex with no asbestos in the ceilings and no record of recent water leak incidents. It's substantially more expensive and the road outside my window is noisy, but I don't care.)
So what's the metaphor here? Well, the opposite of a global-warming skeptic is someone so obsessed with the climate crisis that he/she focuses on fixes that are too specific to just that crisis (e.g. the Richard Branson prize for figuring out how to pull a billion tons of carbon out of the atmosphere per year). Such a person ignores the fact that an unsustainable civilization such as ours will inevitably continue to produce such existential crises. We need to "move out" of this way of life and into one based wholly on technologies and behaviors that don't undermine our own resource base, destroy ecosystem services, etc. The landlady may give us a few more decades to make that move, but we had better not get too sidetracked by short-term fixes that might let us cling to business as usual for a little while longer. As shown on the diagram on the sixth slide of Paul Ray's presentation for the State of the World Forum, relying on such fixes to save us will probably just lead to a slow death for civilization.
