-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis
by Tao Leigh Goffe
Book Reviewed by:A groundbreaking investigation of the Caribbean as both an idyll in the American imagination and a dark laboratory of Western experimentation, revealing secrets to racial and environmental progress that impact how we live today.
In 1492, Christopher Columbus arrived on the Caribbean Island of Guanahaní to find an Edenic scene that was soon mythologized. But behind the myth of paradise, the Caribbean and its people would come to pay the price of relentless Western exploitation and abuse. In Dark Laboratory, Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe embarks on a historical journey to chart the forces that have shaped these islands: the legacy of slavery, indentured labor, and the forced toil of Chinese and enslaved Black people who mined the islands' bounty—including guano, which, at the time, was more valuable than gold—for the benefit of European powers and at the expense of the islands' sacred ecologies.
Braiding together family history, cultural reportage, and social studies, Goffe radically transforms how we conceive of Blackness, the natural world, colonialism, and the climate crisis; and, in doing so, she deftly dismantles the many layers of entrenched imperialist thinking that shroud our established understanding of the human and environmental conditions to reveal the cause and effect of a global catastrophe. Dark Laboratory forces a reckoning with the received forms of knowledge that have led us astray.
Through the lens of the Caribbean, both guide and warning of the man-made disasters that continue to plague our world, Goffe closely situates the origins of racism and climate catastrophe within a colonial context. And in redressing these twin apocalypses, Dark Laboratory becomes a record of the violence that continues to shape the Caribbean today. But it is also a declaration of hope, offering solutions toward a better future based on knowledge gleaned from island ecosystems, and an impassioned, urgent testament to the human capacity for change and renewal.
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 ...
Goffe's scope is wide-ranging and dotted with her personal history; she understands the world she inhabits through discovery and exploration of her ancestral connections, examining how her mixed heritage is inflected with the aftereffects of colonialism. In doing so she makes a too often intellectualized problem — how to solve climate change — deeply intimate. By tracing history in this way, she deftly folds together intertwined historical threads to make visible ecological destructions, racialized violence, and even the multiple apocalyptic events survived by Black and Indigenous peoples across the globe at the hands of Western colonization. But despite the darkness she still sees opportunities for change. Goffe invites readers to recognize that the current ecological conditions are the result of a lack of imagination, not the inevitable path of history running its course...continued
Full Review
(620 words)
(Reviewed by Michelle Anya Anjirbag).
Gretel Ehrlich, author of The Solace of Open Spaces
Dark Laboratory is an urgent exploration of race, climate, and the devastating colonial experimentation with human lives and the natural world. It explodes conventional thinking about the crushing effects of profit-mongering, then unexpectedly, leads us back to sources of original power and ways of knowing who we are. Tao Leigh Goffe is a courageous, big-picture thinker who leaves no leaf unturned. Jack E. Davis, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea
From past to present and island to island, with wisdom and lyricism, Tao Leigh Goffe shows that we cannot honestly reckon with the global climate crisis without acknowledging its roots in the cultural, social, and ecological upheavals first inflicted on the so-called New World and its peoples in 1492—and for centuries thereafter. Yet from this darkness, she offers light. Kiese Laymon, New York Times bestselling author of Heavy
Dark Laboratory is a gargantuan, soulful work. It obliterates most of what I thought I knew about the Caribbean's utility to Western wealth.Dark Laboratory is an incredible reconfiguring of a historical moment that provides a new understanding of the current climate crisis and how it is intertwined with the legacies of colonialism. One way of thinking about the book is as a countertext to commonly taught histories of globalization, colonialism, and climate change. A countertext is a text or narrative that presents events from a different perspective. They are most frequently studied in literary and sociological contexts, but, as Tao Leigh Goffe proves, they can be equally important when contemplating history and the environment. A countertext can be a work of nonfiction or fiction, but in both cases, it is meant to add to, intervene in, or counteract the narratives that readers...
If you liked Dark Laboratory, try these:
by Jessica J. Lee
Published 2025
A prize-winning memoirist and nature writer turns to the lives of plants entangled in our human world to explore belonging, displacement, identity, and the truths of our shared future
by Zoë Schlanger
Published 2025
Award-winning Atlantic staff writer Zoë Schlanger delivers a groundbreaking work of popular science that probes the hidden world of the plant kingdom and reveals the astonishing capabilities of the green life all around us.
by Jake Bittle
Published 2024
The untold story of climate migration—the personal stories of those experiencing displacement, the portraits of communities being torn apart by disaster, and the implications for all of us as we confront a changing future.
 (1).gif)
We should have a great fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Can you name the title?
Test your book knowledge with our daily trivia challenge!
