From the red bauxite mines on the island of Jamaica to low-flying airplanes on the edge of New York City, Tao Leigh Goffe says there are examples of how Black and Indigenous people bear the brunt of exploitation and environmental racism around the globe.
Those injustices are personal. Goffe traces her ancestry to Jamaica and China, and has called London and New York home, with a stint in southeast Queens. She’s a professor at Hunter College where she also runs Dark Laboratory, a research space of global scholars, artists, and technologists that centers storytelling around race, climate, and technology.
In her debut book, “Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, The Caribbean and the Origins of the Climate Crisis,” Goffe argued that the current crisis began the moment Christopher Columbus stepped foot in the Caribbean in 1492. Dark Laboratory weaves together science, history, family narratives, and archival research and offers an array of solutions, from “clams walls” to block storm surges to climate reparations.
The Amsterdam News talked to Goffe about why the moment for this book is now as the world shifts right, how she intertwined memories of Southeast Queens in a book about the Caribbean, and why climate stories need a bit of poetry.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
AmNews: Why this book and why now?
Tao Leigh Goffe (TLG): This book has been a long time coming. I would say the first kernel of it came together in 2017. I think that although it took a long time, it was necessary for it to gestate over that period, because since then, we’ve seen quite a political shift. The book has answered the call to address (the issue) in terms of the legacy that undergirds the kind of fascism that President Trump is professing and promising in terms of “making America great again.” The book is an interrogation of what America is, by beginning with Christopher Columbus and 1492 as the origin of the climate crisis. If we do that, we have to begin in the Caribbean and with the fact that Columbus never even set foot on the mainland United States.
The book is a love letter told from the perspective of islands. but it’s also a love letter to islands. It looks at the cause of the climate crisis from islands and the fact that Columbus landed on Guanahani, which is the present-day Bahamas, in 1492.
It also looks into the future and the ways in which islands can save the future. There’s a real exciting sense in which the cause of the problem, but also the solutions to the problem when it comes to environmental degradation, is in islands. There is no better time than 2025 to be addressing these questions, especially as the Trump administration will be rolling back so much that has been done in terms of climate policy and legislation to protect the environment.
AmNews: In 2021, you were featured in the Hulu series “Initiative 29” about your ancestry. It includes these words: “I am the sedimented sum of four islands — the Caribbean, Hong Kong, the British Isles, New York City — archipelagos. ” How did these words help you land on the ethos of this book?
TLG: It was at a moment when I was writing a lot about geology, and I guess what is now being called Black geologies as a field of study. I wrote an article called “Guano in Their Destiny” in 2019 that led to “Dark Laboratory” as a book, by exploring the fact that guano, which is the dropping of seabirds and bats, became this powerful fertilizer in the 19th century. I began to think about my own history, being of African and Chinese descent, and the rebellious histories of laborers who were forced to mine guano in the 19th century. I began to think about how important island histories are because there are islands made of guano in the Pacific and the Caribbean in which we can understand how capitalism was working to divide people and to break down soil, but also to break down the body. It’s through these extractive economies that I began to think about personal history.
Being born in London and then migrating to New York as a child, it became clear to me that these places are islands, even if they’re not always thought about that way. New York is made up of more than 40 islands. We’re at the shorelines, especially in places like southeast Queens, where I grew up for a period. Looking deeper back into time, I realized that it wasn’t only New York and London that are these island spaces informed by water, but also that my grandfather grew up in Hong Kong, which is also an island, and that Jamaica, where my mother was born, is also an island. It felt like this kind of inheritance was a way to tell the story of climate through these four islands. The book becomes a layered telling of globalization through my personal history.
AmNews: You grew up in southeast Queens., and you say in the book that you saw environmental racism, even though you didn’t really have the name for it at that time. What were some of the things that you were seeing?
TLG: It was as much what I was seeing as what I was hearing, which was the sound of airplanes, always, and seeing them fly so low that you thought they were going to land on the house. As a 12-year-old, that was my kind of imagination — of what it was like living so close to JFK airport. It’s incredible that it is a portal to the United States for much of the world. I think when people look down from the plane, they see the outline of shining lights, but they also see the marshlands of Queens. It’s incredible, thinking back now, about what it meant to live at the edge. Literally, I feel like on the block where I lived, you could walk to the end of it and see the water. And not just the water; the marsh wetlands.
I didn’t have the language for what that meant, but again, it was not just seeing it, it was also smelling it and feeling the humidity. I try to think back to being a 12-year-old and the sensorial experience of what it meant to to live in Queens and to be considered an “inner-city youth,” and what that meant to certain charities and nonprofits that were offering services such as tutoring, and to be aware of what it meant to be a Black child in a majority Black neighborhood, and to be aware that something had happened there in the sense of white flight, which I write about in the book.
It was as much memories of summertime and how hot it would get compared to London. Water would pool after rainstorms and would lead to more mosquitoes. A sense of the swamp came to me, because it’s been very popular in Black studies to think about the swamp as a sanctuary. Then I realized, “Oh, wait, this is where I grew up.” These are the ecologies that I didn’t notice. I began to think about the noise pollution, to think about the mosquitos, and to think about what it means when white flight happens, and the kinds of resources and public health questions that come about — and what’s ignored.
AmNews: You write in your book that poets and policy-makers are equally necessary to face the climate crisis. Why?
TLG: I say that because of Natalie Diaz. I ran a summer institute online in 2021 where we looked at the question of racial cartographies of justice, and Natalie was the keynote speaker. She had just won the Pulitzer Prize for her work “Postcolonial Love Poem.” In reading her words and the power of her phrases, her imagery, which I quote in the book, it became clear that this is the kind of scale of imagination that is needed at the climate policy table.
I began to imagine, “What if we had Mojave poets like her at the climate policy table, at COP?” It made me realize that we need structures beyond the United Nations, beyond the Hague.
I’ve also been inspired by creative writers like Julian Aguon, who is from Guam and who I met recently in Hawaii. We talked about how policy-making and poetry need to be in the same breath, because he told me that there’s something about the concreteness of the problems that an island in the Pacific like Guam faces that attunes him to being able to write in a poetic sense. These questions are not theoretical — they’re ones that are being faced in a life-or-death sense, on an everyday basis. I think those are the questions that Natalie Diaz is contending with on her reservation, on her native lands.
I think policy-makers are often thinking in a very short-term sense. They’re not thinking in the way that the Haudenosaunee Confederacy was thinking in terms of seven generations. There’s a crisis of imagination that we can see politically, but I feel so much is possible in terms of climate solutions and strategies, and we need the prescience of poets to be able to attend to what those questions are before we begin to try to answer them. That gives me a profound sense of hope.