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On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis
by Tao Leigh Goffe
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Introduction
Mountain Ballads
Mountains hold the echoes of history. The vibrations and shock waves of the climate crisis are written in stone, absorbed over the course of geologic time dating back more than four billion years. These mountain ranges were once submerged underwater. If we measure the span of existence by the recent rock record, it tells a layered climate history of precious materials stolen from the earth-mountains of coral, gold, bauxite, and guano-sedimented. Time avalanches with the heaviness of histories of labor exploitation as we reckon with the overwhelming and inevitable ecological crises of the twenty-first century. Within each chapter of climate history exists a labor history, and we draw upon the energy of those who have gone before us. Those forced to extract from the land continue to be deemed disposable for the price of so-called technological progress. The racial regime determined who was forced to extract ores from the earth, and it continues to this day with unnamed millions mining cobalt to source lithium-ion batteries to satisfy the demand for the rechargeable batteries of our electric cars and smartphones.
This is our current perverse geological reality of powering so called green technologies and clean energy solutions. Standing at the precipice of climate collapse, we feel the increasing pressure for the planet to implode with each breath we take. Yet, as a global com munity, we continuously fail to address the origin of the problem. Without economic and historical analyses of the origins of the climate crisis, how can we expect to understand its sedimented layers?
While it is easy to picture plumes of smoke as the primary output of global warming, we must ask questions about the global economy that preceded our dependence on fossil fuels and what remains unseen. The brutal order of plantations organized the world before there were smokestacks and factories. The economies and ideas of plantation slavery have irreparably scarred the natural environment. Before idyllic pastures, mass deforestation was necessary to clear the way for farming. Plantation owners and overseers mutilated the flesh of those they held captive under the whip. With each tree felled, carbon was released into the atmosphere. Sacred branches, hundreds of years old, that had witnessed the first European colonizers were razed in an instant. Gone with this botanical life were the multitude of medicines and materials critical to Indigenous life and traditions. Vacating the land of vast and complex biomes and ecosystems, seventeenth-century monocrop agriculture transformed the planet as new agricultural practices stripped the soil of nutrients. While precious metals and rocks-gold, silver, and quarries of marble-had long been prized throughout the human history of mining, coal and oil have transformed how the world breathes. Agricultural and mining industries asphyxiate the future, the smoke emitted from fossil fuels burning our lungs as it propels a cycle of greed and disposability. Today, wind currents carry debris from faraway forest fires that irritate our airways as we inhale a sky turned a burnt shade of orange. The air is hazy and thick with the ashes of those who have been deemed disposable.
High in the mountains where the air is fresh, the land holds the memory of existential hope amid ecological catastrophes. Mountains carry messages that have been communicated across time and space. The land recalls things that we cannot. Across Black poetic traditions, mountains have held significant political, religious, and environmental meaning. "Go, tell it on the mountain." James Baldwin returned to the lyrics of the African American spiritual for his 1953 book. "Over the hills and everywhere." Initially, Baldwin was going to name his Jim Crow narrative Crying Holy; the sound of the Black Church in these mountain lyrics was Baldwin's choice for his urgent articulation.
Excerpted from Dark Laboratory by Tao Leigh Goffe. Copyright © 2025 by Tao Leigh Goffe. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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