Our Skin Does Not Protect Us from the Climate Crisis

I used to think the border between me and the world was formidable, unyielding. I didn’t yet realize the ways that the earth was acting on my body.

As a child, I used to place my finger carefully on top of the water in the bathtub, steady enough to not break the surface tension. My finger would be touching the water and yet not be wet, as if the liquid had a sort of skin or barrier. An experiment in where I ended and the world began. I decided to try after reading a children’s book filled with scientific experiments, one of which explained why raft spiders can walk on water and why a carefully placed paper clip can float: because water molecules are cohesive and have a natural tendency to keep the outside out and the inside in. It was a peculiar thought: that, with what seemed like an instinct, water desired an unbroken skin. Around the same time, my mother said that the liquid in the womb is similar to the water in the ocean. Now, I imagine that she was most likely talking about the salinity or perhaps simply saying that our fetal life is submarine, but to my child mind it was a bit of magic. Somehow, without ingesting it, the ocean was enclosed inside a parent.

Growing up in South Florida, I spent the bulk of my time either on the beach with friends—placing my towel in the quilt of cliques and silencing my fear of sharks and rip currents to swim out to a sandbar—or doing everything in my power to look good in a bathing suit. This meant doing twenty sit-ups before my showers and, whenever possible, tanning. As a teenager, I would pour a small amount of vegetable oil into a paper cup and spread it over my body before going outside. I sat at the side of the house, where I had both direct sunlight and its reflection off the yellow stucco. I stayed there for hours, looking at the brightness from behind closed lids. I tanned until I almost fainted, my heartbeat a postapocalyptic drum in my ear, the heat rendering my vision and hearing—the wind, the trees—slurred and electric. Once, I did pass out. I woke to blue sky and no idea of how much time had passed.

The sunburns left my pores engorged and balloon-like. My mother used to tell me about how “they never used sunscreen in her day,” that they didn’t know that they should be protecting their skin. I used to think that my border between me and the world was formidable, unyielding. I didn’t yet realize the ways that the earth was acting on my body. But it went the other way, too: Like our bodies, we used to think of the earth as invincible. But the planet is also susceptible to our decision-making. In our current era, the Anthropocene, humans are the main drivers of change in the climate and environment.

Despite my risk factors—naturally pale skin, family history, and growing up sunbathing in South Florida—I spent years avoiding the dermatologist. Sometimes great fear is paired with the only emotion that can contain it: great indifference.

What finally got me to go to the doctor’s office was a tiny waxy bulge in the crook of my nose. When it comes to my skin, I am a picker. I spend an unusual amount of time in front of the mirror extracting oil from my pores and probing any abnormalities. I am the type of person that will scratch at a mosquito bite until it is past recognition. The bulge was met with my usual violence, but it would not go away. I thought that perhaps I had angered a deep pimple or that it was some sort of swollen scar. Because it was on my face, I couldn’t ignore it. I finally booked an appointment.

Despite my risk factors—naturally pale skin, family history, and growing up sunbathing in South Florida—I spent years avoiding the dermatologist.

When the dermatologist called later, she told me I had “the best kind of skin cancer.” Basal cell carcinoma happens when ultraviolet radiation from the sun triggers unchecked growth. It is rarely life-threatening and usually remains local to the skin. “The worst thing that can happen is that the extraction is disfiguring,” she said.

They scooped material from my face, my arm, and my back. Two out of the three biopsies came back cancerous, but the good news was that my insurance would pay for a plastic surgeon to tend to the one on my face, the waxy bulge that brought me into the doctor’s office in the first place. I felt betrayed that the warmth of the sun had triggered this. I felt guilt, too, that my skin cancer was “the best kind.” I didn’t have a right to feel sorry for myself.

Within months, I had two different surgeries. For my back, the doctor drew an ellipse, a little smaller than a Post-it Note, to show how much she would take out. For the surgery on my face, a different doctor allowed me to choose an artist on Spotify to play through the loudspeakers. I panicked and asked for Britney Spears, thinking that Spotify would play “. . . Baby One More Time” or “Crazy,” but instead it was “Circus” that played as the doctor explained what they extracted had clear margins, they were able to get it all out, and that I was lucky—it was very small. On the way home from my appointment I saw a mouse that walked in circle after circle before it fell to the ground writhing. I stooped down to look at the tuft of fur rising and falling with its breath. It must’ve ingested rat poison. I was tempted to overidentify with the mouse—we were both victims of our own permeability—when I realized that even though my nose was all bandaged, I wasn’t wearing sunscreen on the rest of my face. I hurried home.

Now I have to go to the dermatologist every three months. I stand in my gown, basically naked, explaining if anything changed while the doctor inspects my freckles with a device held up to her eye. It looks like the tool a cartoon character would use to inspect a diamond, but instead it is used to zoom in on a mole on my leg. She takes pictures or measurements; we plan our next appointment. Having multiple basal cell carcinomas significantly increases my chances of developing the deadlier variety. I picture myself at sixteen: sunburn making my nose bulbous, my high-contrast tan lines. It’s as if I inherited it, begged for it, even. As though a bit too much pressure was applied and my surface tension broke. In a perfect world, your skin is the clear divider between your body and everything else. A bruise is blood held captive, and the breeze won’t rattle your organs like a wind chime. But it would be a lie to say that the border is perfect. Somehow, my skin had permitted an invasion. Despite all the warnings, I thought I was invincible. But this was a lesson in realizing how permeable my body can be, how fine the line is between my skin and the surrounding world.

I used to teach second grade at a public school in South Florida. Despite the walls and the sealed windows, when it rained, the water would seep into my classroom from the back door. A quarter of the classroom became unusable in the spring. I pushed my bookshelves away from the windows to keep my donated books from becoming warped by the water damage. After a few months of this moisture, an ache would cluster around my temple by midday and settle behind my eyes. Outside of having pneumonia as a child, my lungs had usually operated without complaint. Eventually, I needed an inhaler from working in this classroom. When my doctor prescribed it to me, he asked if I had been in a place that experienced flooding or high humidity. My body was rebelling against another breach of my physical border: mold. When mold makes its way into a human body, it is often treated as an invasion. The body attacks and it can lead to symptoms that range from the pedestrian—allergic response—to the sinister—fever, shortness of breath, infection, asthma.

Mold launches spores that waft through the air and settle on damp material. They are masters of decay that favor hosts like paper, ceiling tiles, wood products, dust, paint, carpet, fabric, and upholstery. Spores abound after rainfall. The air is fecund with them after a hurricane. I can imagine them drifting in through the door, carried into the classroom on the cotton polos of the students. What better place to settle than a humid classroom with its multicolored carpet, its stacks of construction paper, pencils in clusters atop the desks?

This was a lesson in how permeable my body can be, how fine the line is between my skin and the surrounding world.

“Mold may be one of the most devastating, long-term and hidden costs of America’s increasingly humid, wet and stormy climate,” Winston Choi-Schagrin wrote in The New York Times. The mold predates the school. It thrived in what used to be swampland before it was cut into farmland by canals and drainage. Situated east of Zora Neale Hurston’s Belle Glade—the site of the great flood in Their Eyes Were Watching God—and above the Everglades, the land is perpetually damp. I think of the inevitable flooding and subsequent mold as a sort of natural rebellion, the land actively trying to return to its former state. Amitav Ghosh describes a similar process in The Nutmeg’s Curse: “As we look at the floods, wildfires, and droughts that afflict some of the most intensively terraformed parts of the Earth . . . it is hard not to wonder whether those landscapes have not decided to shrug off the forms imposed on them by European settlers.”

South Florida looks nothing like it did even twenty years ago. Old land is constantly sold for development, and an influx of new inhabitants clamor for lots in built neighborhoods where ground has not yet been broken. In fact, the land the school sat atop actually used to be the Everglades. In its natural state, the wetlands extended from Orlando to the Keys (around the size of Connecticut) and held mile-long schools of mullet fish. Over centuries, decayed and compressed saw grass, pickerelweed, and other plant matter became peat. This soil traps carbon dioxide and imprisons it as long as it is wet. When we plow and drain wetlands for agricultural use, the soil releases silos of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. These are the consequences of construction and rampant sprawl.

When contemplating the climate crisis, I have difficulty engaging with a long emergency. I am not sure how to react to the accumulation of rare, catastrophic events without resorting to what critical theorist Sianne Ngai would call “stuplimity,” a sensation she describes as feeling simultaneously numb and hyperattentive. For me, this kind of indifference is tempting to apply to both the world and the body. It’s the reason that I waited to go to the dermatologist until an emergency of vanity, and it’s the reason we don’t see subtle shifts in environmental response until water makes its way under our doors. We too often think of our bodies, our health, as something separate from the natural world. But the line between the inside and outside is thin at best. Our largest organ faces the sun, and we invite particles into our body simply by breathing.

We have entered a time when human activity has become the main influence on the climate and the environment, but also a time when both of those things have a massive influence on our bodies. In a world of escalating erratic weather events, this border is more porous than we might like to acknowledge. Now, the idea of a womb pregnant with ocean seems less far-fetched. It makes me think of another childhood story my mother told me that, until recently, I thought was pure fiction. It involved a little girl diving off a cliff into the ocean and hitting her head on the rocky bottom. When she went to the doctor, an X-ray revealed that she had a living crab inside of her unbroken skull. I asked my mother about the story’s origins, wondering if it came from a book or a movie, and she laughed. I was remembering a warped version of a true story. The crab inside the skull was a detail that I had invented and added later. The true story is that my mother’s sister once dove into a wave and hit her head in the sand. She went to the doctor and there was a crab in her hair. It’s as if my unconscious knew something that, in my youth, I wasn’t ready to see: that regardless of my indifference, the outside finds its way in.