'' DARK LABORATORY '' DAMP : BOOK REVIEW

 

Origin story. '' Dark Laboratory '' : On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis.  By Tao Leigh Goffe.

The slow-motion disaster that is climate change started with our unearthing long-buried organic matter and lighting it aflame, which released particles into the atmosphere that hold warmth.

This is the story we tell ourselves about a central cause of our warming planet. But what if slowing down the climate change juggernaut has proved so difficult in part because we talk about the problem all wrong?

Tao Leigh Goffe's '' Dark Laboratory : On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis '' argues that current scientific discourse obscures the racist roots of our existential predicament while also overlooking potential strategies of repair and endurance.

Goffe, an interdisciplinary scholar and writer, contends that to understand our present plight, we need to look back in time, in particular to the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Caribbean in 1492, which she cites as a marker for the start of globalization.

Over the intervening centuries, the region's interconnected islands have served as a kind of testing ground for different colonial practices - chattel slavery, resource extraction and the classification of flora and fauna [ as well as people ] that transformed the world, destroying ecosystems, lives and livelihoods, while simultaneously bearing strange fruit.

'' Dark Laboratory '' is as interested in identifying the causes of the climate crises as it is in offering a kind of alternative account of life in the wake of environmental apocalypse.

Once I realized the European colonial archives are evidence lockers full of crimes against humanity, I began to stop arguing the case in court, as it were,'' Goffe writes, '' It becomes liberating then to evaluate not what lies enclosed within the walls of colonial architecture, but to begin to comprehend the magnitude of what is outdoors.''

The World Students Society thanks Elizabeth Rush.