Dark Laboratory’s attempt to view the climate crisis through the lens of early colonialism makes some valid points but fails to develop a coherent analysis, argues John Clarke

Throughout the chapters of this book, Tao Leigh Goffe deals with issues that are of enormous significance and importance. She explores the impacts of colonialism, the racism that was woven this process and the ways in which science has been distorted to justify and inspire colonial oppression. She considers the extractivism that was imposed on countries that were incorporated into empires and the environmental degradation that this involved. She also looks at examples of Indigenous and anti-colonial resistance.

Despite the vital questions that the book delves into, I found the account that emerges to be incomplete and inaccurate in important ways. One of those who provided an endorsement of this work, Jeffrey Boakye from Black Listed, considered it ‘essential reading for anyone curious about the intersections of identity, colonialism, capitalism and the climate crisis.’ He also praised Dark Laboratory for its ‘clarity, passion, insight and a frequently beautiful poetic turn of phrase.’

Images and impressions of colonial oppression, the assault on the natural world and resilience in the face of these injustices do, indeed, fill this book, emerging in a form that could almost be described as a stream of consciousness. However, I certainly wouldn’t use the word ‘clarity’ in my assessment of it and its claim to shed light on ‘the origins of the climate crisis’ simply isn’t lived up to, in my view.

Dark Lab project

Goffe is an associate professor at the City University of New York and a driving force behind the project that gives the book its title. She describes it as ‘a space for research on climate, race, and technology, and, more important, it is a philosophy. We at the lab understand that the climate crisis cannot be solved without solving the racial crisis … With over thirty members worldwide … we collaborate on a wide range of creative storytelling projects centering on Black and Indigenous ecologies’ (p.xxiii).

In the course of this book, though emphasis is placed on the Caribbean, Goffe draws examples from a wide range of countries. If she simply wished to demonstrate the deeply racist nature of colonial projects, the great harm they have caused and to show how the attributes of capitalism that would later lead to uncontrolled carbon emissions and the climate crisis were already manifest in the conduct of the empire builders, Goffe’s book would provide a series of examples that illustrated these things.

Dark Laboratory, however, sets out some very definite political propositions and musters evidence in support of them, albeit in ways that are somewhat confusing. It seeks to contribute to ‘interdisciplinary methods for our collective global survival beyond the climate crisis’ (p.xxv). At the same time, it argues that ‘eugenicist and white supremacist principles are embedded in climate science – not to mention the foundation of natural history as a discipline’ (p.xxx).

There is no question that racist assumptions have tainted the development of science and even led to the vilest forms of pseudo-science, the impacts of which are with us to this day. It is also quite true, as Goffe asserts, that ‘racism has severely limited who has been able to pursue science as a career’ (p.xxx).

Yet, going beyond such justified criticisms of the scientific establishment, Goffe draws sweeping and unsupported conclusions that question the validity of important advances in climate science. She rejects ‘the academic analytic appellation of the so-called Anthropocene that was coined in the 1980s popularized in the year 2000 because it is jargon, which means it can only fail us. The term anthro, or human, reveals a self-centred approach. It is invested in the myth of human supremacy … The debates of the Anthropocene often fail to distribute the blame where it is due, on so called developed nations. To use the word “Anthropocene” is to universally blame all human societies’ (p.xxiv).

That the official discourse in this society, to the extent that it acknowledges the climate threat, focuses on a generalised ‘human activity’ as the source of the problem, rather than the capitalist form of society that shapes that activity, is beyond dispute. For that matter, most climate scientists fail to draw the anti-capitalist conclusions for which their scientific findings cry out.

The concept of the Anthropocene, however, is based on scientific studies of the impacts on the natural world of the activity of human societies and it is very much more than ‘jargon.’ It is based on the conclusion that, at a certain point in the twentieth-century, that activity reached a level of impact on the natural world that constituted a qualitative change and set the stamp of human influence on planetary evolution. Regardless of inadequate or inaccurate political conclusions that may be drawn from it, the concept of the Anthropocene remains a vital scientific finding that anyone wishing seriously to appraise the climate crisis should take fully into account.

While she is ready to reject such an important step forward in understanding the processes that have led to the present climate crisis as the Anthropocene, throughout the book Goffe stresses the significance of the knowledge and insights of Indigenous people and populations that have had colonialism imposed on them.

Without doubt, the relationships with the surrounding environment that people in many parts of the world have created are full of important lessons that can be applied today, as we seek to survive intensifying climate impacts. However, present-day climate science is studying results that flow from decades of fossil-fuel consumption that didn’t exist in the classic colonial period and using a body of knowledge and methods of investigation that were unavailable at that time. The tainted roots of modern science and the shortcomings and elitism of its practitioners doesn’t negate the validity of climate science and its findings.

Throughout the book, Goffe fails to draw a clear line between the exploitative methods of capitalism, including its propensity for environmentally destructive practices, and the specific factors that have led to the present climate catastrophe that threatens humanity so starkly. The general readiness to pursue profits, while disregarding destructive environmental impacts, was certainly fully present during the colonial period. However, it took the later development of fossil-fuel capitalism, with the rampant carbon emissions that came with it, to advance the process of global heating to levels that are so profoundly dangerous.

Based on this accumulation of climate impacts, forms of scientific investigation were pursued that developed an understanding of this unfolding process. Without any disrespect to the colonised people of Jamaica, their understandings or their active resistance, we must dispute Goffe’s claim that there existed in the eighteenth century something that can be described as ‘Maroon climate science’ (p.25).

Colonialism and climate

There is no doubt that Goffe has travelled extensively, has a thorough knowledge of the places that she examines in her book and that she is able to draw upon wide-ranging sources of information in all of them. Indeed, the picture she paints of local conditions and challenges is the most useful and interesting part of Dark Laboratory. It is as a contribution to understanding the roots of the climate crisis and the global struggle for climate justice, that I felt that it falls short.

Throughout the chapters of the book, Goffe provides a series of themes that she uses to advance her political conclusions around the colonial process and its links, as she sees them, to climate change. These are dealt with in three sections, the objectives of which she sets out in her introduction. In the first, ‘Eden Is Not Lost,’ she ‘explores the premise of the Caribbean as the origin of the climate crisis after Christopher Columbus’s arrival there in 1492.’

The second section considers ‘Geological Time and Black Witness’ and it ‘looks at the delicate balance of island ecosystems’ and ‘focuses on regeneration and rebellion in the Pacific and Atlantic world.’ The final section, ‘Life in the Garden After Eden,’ asks ‘what it means to survive beyond the lab of European colonial experimentation’ (p.xxxvi).

In writing this review, I have chosen not to provide any chapter-by-chapter examination of the case that is set out. I felt, frankly, that Goffe is really only providing us with a very limited number of political conclusions around colonialism and climate. In each chapter she selects some aspect or detail of colonial reality to draw out these ideas in ways that I often found repetitive and impressionistic. For this reason, I shall focus on one chapter, in order to demonstrate my reservations.

The fourth chapter, ‘Breathing Underwater,’ draws on the experiences of African slaves being transported to the plantations, the ecological threat to coral reefs and several other factors to drive home some of Goffe’s political arguments. She begins with the image of the slaves who drowned and links this to liberation struggles and climate restoration. She asks ‘what if the first garden [Eden] was underwater? The Middle Passage becomes a Black Atlantis, shrouded in futurity instead of suffering’ (p.95). She adds that there ‘are even myths of them not drowning but walking or flying back to Africa’ (p.96). It is then suggested that ‘Africans were stolen specifically to transform the climate of the Americas’ (p.96). The account then moves to the present refugee crisis, and deaths in the Mediterranean are evoked, which Goffe, with complete justification, attributes to ‘centuries of European colonial design’ (p.97).

At this point, the question of corals is addressed, with the argument that the ‘coral song is the siren song of the climate crisis because corals have witnessed much over geological time’ (p.98). Based on this, listening ‘to the corals tells a story of transformation and potential regeneration’ (p.101). Goffe then takes note of ‘a new Gold Rush of prospecting and speculation that will ravage the seas’ (p.101).

Goffe then explores the importance of swimming in Black history and at the present time. She suggests that the ‘water spirits of the Black diaspora are the maestros of the coral symphony teaching lessons on symbiosis – teaching us how we will breathe beyond the apocalypse’ (p.104). She again argues at this point that ‘scientifically speaking, the fact that knowledge produced by people worldwide is dismissed as unworthy of inclusion in “science” shows a racial bias’ (p.105).

There is then a section on ‘the freedom of Black underwater worlds’ that deals with cultural expressions of the ‘underwater racial formations of the Middle Passage’ (p.106) in support of the ongoing argument of a body of knowledge that is vital to recovery and regeneration in the face of climate change. Goffe then explores how racist names have been given to coral formations and further considers the impacts of colonialism and racism.

The chapter goes on to consider the work of Charles Darwin and asks was ‘Darwin really the first to see that all life-forms, from elephants to humans to barnacles to plankton, are interrelated. What sorts of parallel theories might have developed from other societies and traditions of science alongside evolution?’ (p.118). Though she recognises that ‘it was not his direct intention,’ she then suggests that the concept of ‘survival of the fittest’ went over to notions of eugenics and ‘a racist justification for racial cleansing’ (p.119).

Goffe insists that ‘adaptation and repair’ requires more than ‘quick-fix solutions’ that don’t address ‘the origins of the crisis.’ As she puts it, ‘just as the problem is interlocked with capitalist hyperdrive, the solution must be interlocked with anti-capitalism’ (p.125). The problem, however, is that, beyond an examination of the colonial projects that capitalism has unleashed, the racism it has generated and its generally destructive approach to the natural world, we aren’t offered any explanation of what this system is and how precisely it has generated the climate crisis.

The chapter concludes, based on the observations of groups of whales, that the ‘world does not have to drown if we synchronize our breathing. Adaptive strategies of survival are possible, as coral waves show us. And listening to corals, the oldest living animals, shows us alternatives for living beyond and breathing underwater’ (p.131).

Unwarranted conclusions

I hope that, by tracing some of the arguments and the form in which they are developed in this chapter, I have highlighted the fundamental problems with this book. I suggested earlier that a ‘stream of conscious’ approach was at work and I think this is a valid characterisation. Images and impressions are thrown out in a rapid order that can be somewhat confusing but these are interspersed with very definite political positions. A significant portion of them, in my opinion, consist of unwarranted conclusions.

While, as I have already stressed, the historic injustices of colonialism and of the present imperialist world order are entirely real and worthy of nothing but condemnation, this book expresses the clearest form of a liberal politics of identity. Colonialism and racism are justifiably condemned but never explained or placed in a meaningful context. Though capitalism is referred to disapprovingly, there is no attempt to show how the drive to accumulate profits led to projects of colonial domination.

Throughout the book, there is considerable imprecision as to the distinction between the general tendency of capitalist forms of production to further environmental degradation and the very particular development of fossil-fuel capitalism that unleashed the process of global heating. The former tendency was fully present in the colonial era but rampant carbon emissions and the climate crisis came later.

The history of science has much to answer for and the record of promoting racial hierarchies is part of that. Nor is the present-day scientific establishment free of complicity in racial and global inequality. However, important gains in the understanding of the development and advance of climate change have been made that are of enormous importance and we need to draw upon them as we challenge the system that has created this dire threat to our existence.

That the struggle for survival in which we are now engaged is shaped by fault lines of inequality that massively impact the Global South and that this is central to the fight for climate justice, is quite beyond dispute but the mass of working-class people in the Global North has a stake in that struggle. The resistance and efforts at recovery on the part of people in those parts at the world that were colonised are utterly vital but they are nonetheless only one part of a global struggle against capitalism that Goffe fails to even consider.

While it draws upon some very vital elements of the climate crisis, Dark Laboratory fails to provide a coherent analysis of the ‘origins of the climate crisis,’ an understanding of the social and economic system that has created it or any effective means of challenging it and establishing an ecologically sustainable society.