Did Christopher Columbus Jump-Start the Climate Crisis?

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 crisis as it is in offering a kind of alternative account of life in the wake of environmental apocalypse. “Once I realized that 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 architectures, but to begin to comprehend the magnitude of what is outdoors.”

In this case, “outdoors” encompasses a lot of different places at different moments in time. “Dark Laboratory” hops from Jamaica to Hong Kong, New York and London — all locales to which Goffe traces her roots — landing intermittently on a host of other spots in between (Dominica, Tahiti, Sardinia, Hawaii). In each, Goffe’s ear is tuned to songs of resistance, to what it looks like to make life amid (and after) colonial subjugation. The result is an assemblage of sorts where blue-footed boobies, coral reefs and even bat guano play a leading role, illustrating the ways nonhuman actors and their attendant ecologies have survived human predation.

Consider, for instance, “the curious case of the Calcutta mongoose in Jamaica” (the title of one of Goffe’s chapters). The animal was imported by a white plantation owner to eat the rats (endemic to Europe) that were eating the sugar cane (endemic to India) that he was hellbent on exporting to the United States and Europe, where it would be distilled into rum. This tiny passage in a much larger tale of imperial appetites transformed the ecology of Jamaica, leading to, among other things, the near extinction of native ground-nesting birds.