The Sunburn Chronicles

By Mikayla Kifer

            “We are going to ask you to wear a t-shirt in the water in order to minimize the chances of burning your back and shoulders, and to minimize reef exposure to sunscreen.” When I read this sentence, I was delirious from sleep deprivation because of tough traveling hours at the end of midterm break. And with a limitation on the amount of luggage we could bring for the two weeks at Monteverde and Bocas del Toro, Panama, I was hesitant to toss in a long-sleeved shirt when I already had a flannel to keep me warm at Monteverde and field t-shirts for everything else. When I first saw the glittering, blue water of the Bocas del Toro islands, my first thought was, “This place is heaven on Earth.” My second thought: I’m going to die.

            If Snow White was albino, she would be about as pale as I am. Dermatologists tell me that a few severe sunburns could set me on the path to skin cancer. Which makes sense given that I burn after 15 minutes of direct sunlight exposure…in the northern United States. Facing a week of snorkeling under the tropical sun in just shorts and a t-shirt and without any sunscreen didn’t really seem like a good idea. But the consequences of me lathering on my SPF 85 could be deadly for the poor, innocent corals that I was studying.

            I had been thrown into an interesting moral dilemma, with death by skin cancer on one end of the spectrum and coral reef collapse on the other. Yes, it seems unlikely that a week of bad sunburns would kill me, and equally unlikely that a week of sunscreen use would kill the reef. But I think it’s important to consider all possibilities, because thinking about this one problem can shed light on similar and more extreme situations.

            What should we do when confronted with situations where we have to make a choice between ourselves and the environment? I believe there are a variety of options that depend somewhat on the severity and the certainty of the consequences. This issue becomes particularly complicated when it comes to the actions of an individual in the broad scope of anthropogenic climate change. Is flipping off the lights every time I leave the room going to save the world? Absolutely not. But what if I flip off the lights, buy an electric car, and stop eating meat and imported fruit? Still no. Yet every action I take to reduce my carbon footprint and the environmental consequences that I cause does something, even if I can’t quantify the tangible benefit. It’s one fewer tree cut down. It’s one shark without a stomach full of plastic bottles. Small efforts have meaning especially when one considers that the average American emits 540 times more carbon dioxide than the average citizen of Ethiopia. Even more important are the actions that everyone takes. One person is not going to save the world, but many individuals will.

           Just me deciding not to wear sunscreen is not going to save the reef if everyone else wears it. This is where Kant’s categorical imperative comes in. “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.” We have an obligation to not consider ourselves exceptions to the rule, and we should act in the way that we believe everyone else should too. When so many environmental issues are a summation of small environmentally destructive actions, we need to hold ourselves accountable to taking small environmentally friendly actions because we can make a difference when we act as a multitude of individuals.

            In case you’re wondering, yes, I got sunburned because I didn’t wear sunscreen. I went out the next day covered in a borrowed shirt from our professor, Mau, and field pants. On the bright side, I don’t think I killed any corals. I’ll check back in 30 years on the skin cancer.