View image in fullscreen Tao Leigh Goffe says Europe turned the Caribbean islands into a ‘dark laboratory of colonial desire and experiments’. Tao Leigh Goffe argues climate breakdown is the mutant offspring of European scientific racism and colonialism We all think we know what is causing the breakdown of the planet’s climate: burning fossil fuels that release carbon dioxide, change the chemistry of the air and trap more heat from the sun, leading to rising temperatures. But Tao Leigh Goffe, an associate professor of Africana, Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at the City University of New York, wants us to visualise a far more specific cause: the shunting of a ship’s prow on to the sandbank of a paradise island in 1492. In Dark Laboratory, her groundbreaking new book, Goffe argues that it was the colonisation of the Americas by Christopher Columbus that set off the chain of events that has led us to where we stand today, on the precipice of global catastrophe. Climate breakdown, she says, is the mutant offspring of European scientific racism and colonialism, conceived in the suffering millions of Africans, Asians and Indigenous Americans endured at the altar of capital accumulation. The climate crisis is, put simply, also a racial crisis, and it is only once we come to terms with this, Goffe says, and what it means for the ways we relate to the world and each other today, that we can hope to find a solution. “The broad thesis is a kind of unanswered question for me, which is how can we find a way not to betray the future?” Goffe said. “I feel the book is really written with a sense that redemption is possible, but that would require collective action.” View image in fullscreen Cartí Sugtupu, a small Caribbean island […]