Tao Leigh Goffe

Tao Leigh Goffe

Tao Leigh Goffe is a 2024–25 Racial Justice Fellow at the Carr Center and an Associate Professor of literary theory and cultural history with a focus on the environmental humanities and geology at Hunter College, City University of New York. Her work builds on a long-standing research interest in the intersection of climate, race, and digital technologies and is the basis of Dark Laboratory, which she founded and leads as the Executive Director. Her newest book, Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis, explores how 1492 was the genesis of the climate crisis.

Q: Can you tell us a little about yourself, your background, and your scholarly expertise?

{TLG}: I’m originally from the U.K., and grew up between London, New York City, and New Jersey. Islands are a really important part of my origin story because I have ancestral roots in Jamaica and Hong Kong. I teach courses at Hunter College as a Professor of Black Studies and Environmental Humanities on these matters and what may be considered the archipelagic turn, and have been teaching since 2011 when I was a grad student at Yale.

What else defines me? I’m a new mother. A DJ. An artist. As the Executive Director of Dark Laboratory—which I founded in 2020 to study climate, race, and technology—I support collaborations at the nexus of investigating stolen land and stolen life. It is informed by my scholarly expertise in the guano trade, which led me to understand geology as critical to how we comprehend racialization as a dynamic process across space and time. Publishing my 2019 article “Guano in their Destiny: Race, Geology, and a Philosophy of Indenture” was a pivotal moment in my career, which led me to choosing to publish my first book as a trade book.

Dark Laboratory

Q: Can you share with us what your exciting new book, The Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of Climate Justice, is about? 

{TLG}: Dark Laboratory: On the Caribbean, Columbus, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis is a climate odyssey and journey across islands in which I examine how colonialism is at the root of the climate crisis. I begin in 1492 with Columbus’ arrival in the Caribbean and narrate a story of climate optimism and the lessons we can learn about repair from non-human ecologies. I follow corals, mongooses, volcanoes, and marijuana to explore the history of environmental degradation.

Q: In your book, you note how the common opinion is to place the start of the current climate crisis that we are experiencing in the 18th century amidst the Industrial Revolution. However, you posit that the climate crisis actually began with Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean, hundreds of years earlier than the Industrial Revolution. What in your research brought you to come to this conclusion?

{TLG}: I critique the historiographical approach that looks to the Industrial Revolution as the origin story of the climate crisis, suggesting that 1492 is a more accurate starting point because of Columbus’ introduction of sugarcane to the Caribbean. I believe the plantation economy and the birth of Western agricultural science is overlooked in how it impacted the logic of how factories were managed and operated during the Industrial Revolution. The ahistorical approach of omitting the role of African enslavement and the dispossession of Native sovereignty hinders the planet from solving the climate crisis.

Deforestation
Deforestation of a once-thriving woodland.

The obsession with optimization and efficiency is derived from the plantation economy of the Americas, and the world suffers as a result because of deforestation and monocrop agriculture. Not only was the soil exhausted by planting cash crops, but genocide was also enacted by Europeans who exhausted people, stealing lives and lands. Yet African and Native peoples survived these timelines of apocalypse. Therefore, I argue that we ought to look to Black and Native communities as leaders at the policy table when it comes to global climate reforms.

Q: Can you describe to us a few of the other key findings you discovered in The Dark Laboratory? What—and who—must we consider when creating and considering potential solutions to climate change and the issues it causes?

{TLG}: It is urgent to ask, “Who is the protagonist of the crisis?” When I teach graduate seminars. I highlight the work of Jamaican philosopher Sylvia Wynter and her critique of the use of “we.” I redefine the terms of “who” by listening as much to human ecologies and to non-human ecologies wherein bats are witnesses of the climate crisis. Mongoose and coral reefs have many lessons to teach about collective action and survival. Indigenous activists and artists like Chamorro human rights lawyer Julian Aguon—the author of No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies who recently made at case at the ICJ—are the people to listen to. Julian Aguon and I met for the first time in Honolulu and discussed how our islands—Jamaica and Guam—are kindred. Poets like Natalie Diaz, who writes about her native Mojave Nation, are the ones to listen to because of a prescient sense of non-linear time. Soon, Natalie and I will be in conversation at my book launch at the South Street Seaport McNally Jackson bookstore.

I am thrilled to be in such wonderful company. In the book, I turn to Black politicians like Barbados Prime Minster Mia Mottley and Black birdwatchers like Christian Cooper as important climate leaders. In my research over the past fifteen years, I have met geologists of color in D.C., where I delivered a geology keynote address. I have learned from Maroon chiefs in Jamaica about how the land is a pact. And so, a core question I asked in Dark Laboratory is, “Who will protect the land from us?”

Q: Who in our societies and around the world are the most vulnerable to climate change, and how so? What do you foresee happening to our social structures in the future as climate change progresses?

{TLG}: The most vulnerable are those who live literally at the edge, those in coastal communities. Often, I have found that Black and Indigenous peoples have been forced to the edge of the land and sea. Reflecting on 20 years since the horrors of Hurricane Katrina, we must take stock of what has changed regarding climate policy and the premature death of Black Americans. These questions have led me to a study that connects New Orleans to Shinnecock Nation on Long Island and Hellshire Beach in Jamaica.

Houses collapse due to coastal erosion
Houses collapse due to coastal erosion.

With an award from the Ford Foundation, I am directing a film that will center the impact of coastal erosion on communities of color. Based on the research of the esteemed Black geographers Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Clyde Woods, I foresee social structures following the pattern of planned abandonment under state mismanagement. I only predict racial fault lines and frictions growing more divisive, unfortunately, unless we address the colonial origins of the climate crisis back to 1492. Optimistically, I also foresee stronger ties between the Pacific and Caribbean, and dream of the work that Julian Aguon and I could partner on together through the connected geology and history of the guano trade and sugarcane production.

Q: Who are the actors who perpetuate climate injustices today? What is preventing us from finding and carrying out meaningful climate justice solutions?

{TLG}: Climate injustice is perpetuated by policymakers who lack imagination. We must critique inaction and passiveness as much as the evils of petrochemical corporations. Climate and colonial reparations are due, and yet we live in a world where greenwashing and bluewashing are rampant.

Led by all-inclusive hotels and cruise ships, there are campaigns that only further imperial desires by seizing the beaches and the oceans for tourism. They pretend to restore coral reefs as a cover for their continued extractivist economies. It is unsurprising that these resorts are highly segregated by race. While carbon emissions are important, there are other metrics that we need to pay attention to regarding the crisis.

Caledonian Sky cruise ship
The Caledonian Sky cruise ship ran aground at Raja Ampat in Indonesia in 2017, severely damaging one of the country's richest coral reefs. 

Q: What inspired you to write a book on these topics?

{TLG}: I was inspired to write this book by my travels to islands—Jamaica, Tahiti, Sardinia, Aruba, Dominica. The book is a love letter to islands from the ridge to the reef. I was inspired by the soundtracks of coqui frogs I have listened to in the rainforests of Jamaica and Hawaii. I was inspired conceptually by Toni Morrison, who was my professor when I was an undergraduate student at Princeton University. She famously said, “if there is a book you need to read that has not been written, then you must write it.”

I was lucky that in my travels across islands, my characters—coral reefs, mongooses, and birds—appeared to me and told me the story of our potential climate redemption by critiquing Christopher Columbus’ exploitative actions.

Q: You joined the Carr Center as a Racial Justice Fellow for our 2024–2025 cohort—how has your experience been so far, and what do you hope to accomplish during the remainder of your time with the Center?

{TLG}: So far, I have had an enriching intellectual experience as part of the 2024-2025 cohort of racial justice fellows at the Carr Center. Though none of us had met before this fellowship, our work is already in conversation, which makes collaboration natural. Shortly after the U.S. election in November, we were able to turn to one another on the matter of racial justice and what Donald Trump’s re-election means for us as educators in different parts of the country and the world.

We have all been grateful for the research privileges of the most comprehensive library in the world, bar none. I am collaborating on a display in May at the HKS Library for Dark Laboratory that will focus on climate and race and look forward to continuing pre-production for my film on coastal erosion and racial crisis during my fellowship.