Book Review – Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, The Caribbean, And The Origins Of The Climate Crisis By Tao Leigh Goffe

The world is undeniably in a very dark place right now. It feels like there is a constant barrage of terrible news, things getting worse every day, and it can feel like we’re sleepwalking into the end of days. I know I’ve been guilty of a fair amount of doomscrolling as the media seems perfectly happy to keep providing a constant stream of new disasters from around the world. One of the biggest existential threats that has been constantly hanging over all our heads for decades now despite the best efforts of many to ignore it is the aptly named Climate Crisis. The Climate Crisis is a massive and very complicated problem that has an effect on pretty much every aspect of life in one way or another. As such it has been written about extensively and from a wide variety of different perspectives by people far more intelligent than me. One perspective I haven’t seen explored much, or at least one which I haven’t seen explored in much detail, is linking the Climate Crisis with colonialism. This is the position taken in Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis by Tao Leigh Goffe. Dark Laboratory is an ambitious book both in scale and depth as it examines colonialism and its modern environmental repercussions. With this book Goffe investigates how the Caribbean became a dark laboratory, as she puts it, for Western exploitation, connecting historical colonial practices with today’s climate crisis.

  Goffe herself, is a highly acclaimed writer, theorist, academic, and interdisciplinary artist who has been championing this perspective for a long time now. This book is an extension of her work with her Dark Laboratory project which is a wider initiative focusing on how the long reaching shadows of colonialism extend to the environmental degradation we see around us now. This book combines aspects of history, environmental and racial critique, and memoir all in one 361-page package. As could probably be expected from an academic of her stature, Goffe’s writing is dense and intellectually demanding. She takes no half measures, using archival research, oral histories, and cultural reporting with detailed footnotes, and a full bibliography of all the books and articles she draws upon to make a very thorough case. To be honest, this book was a little challenging in places and I could see some readers being intimidated by it, as I was at first, but Goffe is an artist as well as an academic. She brings her years of experience in both arenas to her writing. As a reader it is hard to believe this is only the first book she has written, but as they say, the proof is in the pudding.

  She quickly draws the reader in, seamlessly moving from academic to expressive descriptions of Jamaica, Hong Kong, her personal connections to both, and each country’s struggles over the centuries. This can be seen all throughout the book. I’ll give an example where she writes about the slave trade’s middle passage. “Many underwater origin stories lead Black people to the Atlantic as a powerful realm of mourning and becoming. What if the first garden was underwater? The middle passage becomes a Black Atlantis shrouded in futurity instead of suffering. It is a zone of transformation that anchors the order of Afrofuturist galaxies where Black people live free. A subaquatic Eden of sorts, it is a lost utopia”. Here she looks at the middle passage through the lens of the mythical world of Drexciya and from there to the modern Detroit based electronic music duo of the same name. I had never seen the word Drexciya before in my life, (I even looked up how to pronounce it to make sure I was reading it in my head correctly) and now it feels like Goffe has introduced me to an entire world of Afrofuturist mythology and the art it inspired. She shows over and over again how the past reverberates outwards to the present day in ways that as a reader I had never heard of. She paints a world where there are no arbitrary divisions between past, present and future as the three are all constantly influencing and shaping each other. Viewed through this lens the slave trade isn’t a horrible event that happened centuries ago that we’ve moved on from. It’s something that just happened yesterday. The climate crisis isn’t a hypothetical future where the earth is uninhabitable. It’s happening everywhere and its happening now.

  Her skilled judgement with a well-placed turn of phrase and ability to effortlessly hopscotch between historical fact, her personal experiences, and the present crisis we face combine to make a compelling read. She writes chapters exploring the histories and present-day ramifications of things I never really gave much, if any, consideration to such as the anatomy and biology of Corals, and the history of guano mining. These might sound like dry and niche subjects, and in another writer’s hands they might be, but not in Goffe’s. It takes a strong and confident writer to take something most people never think about like the introduction of the Mongoose to Jamaica and think to herself not only am I going to devote an entire chapter to it, but I’m going to make it fascinating. She writes about how the Mongoose was introduced to Jamaica not through natural migration, or after carefully considered government study like the recent reintroduction of Beavers to Britain, but by a single White Jamaican plantation owner called W.B. Espeut. It almost reads like a cautionary tale against arrogance and hubris as with no qualifications beyond being an amateur botanist Espeut decided to import Indian Mongooses into Jamaica to hunt the rats that were eating his plantations sugar cane and cutting into his profit margins. All that mattered to him was that Mongooses eat rats; he didn’t seem to care about anything else. The problem with this plan, which should be obvious to anyone who gives it even a little thought, is that the Indian Mongoose had no natural predator in Jamaica, and they are omnivores that will eat rats, but will also eat things that are easier to get than rats like bird eggs for example. The result was the Indian Mongoose became an invasive species devastating Jamaica’s native fauna and flora, and Espeut still had rats. This chapter also provided a perfect encapsulation of Goffe’s Dark Laboratory in action as one guy decided to turn an entire country into his personal lab to conduct his experiments, permanently altering its ecology just to increase his own profits because he decided he knew best. I trust the parallels between Espeut’s actions and the west’s colonisation of the Caribbean, Hong Kong, and Africa are not lost on anyone.

  The story of the Indian Mongoose is one of many such examples Goffe provides throughout her book of this interaction between the past and the problems we face today. Through this, and other points like it, Dark Laboratory is a book which asks the reader to reconsider the long-term consequences of actions taken centuries ago many of which have been intentionally whitewashed or forgotten. According to Goffe, globalisation doesn’t have its origins in the 1970’s, but in 1492 and Columbus’ arrival in the Caribbean. It is a reminder that the past is never truly behind us and that addressing the climate crisis properly will require a deep and serious engagement with the historical forces that have shaped our world. On a personal note, I would easily recommend this book to anyone who is willing to come to it with an open mind and in good faith. These two points, an open mind and acting in good faith, are important as this book directly and unflinchingly tackles subjects which can be considered controversial by some. There are some people out there who even now in the year 2025 are still absolutely convinced that man-made climate change is a myth despite an abundance of evidence to the contrary, and who think racism and inequality are things of the past which will disappear if we ignore them long enough. Sadly, this book is unlikely to change their minds, and their heads will probably remain firmly planted in the sand. For all who do choose to read it however, Goffe has presented a reminder that the legacies of colonialism are not confined to the annals of history but continue to resonate in the environmental and social challenges we face today.

An advance copy of this book was sent to TREC before publishing.

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