Today on Justice Matters co-host Maggie Gates speaks with Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe, associate professor of literary theory and cultural history with a focus on climate, race, and digital technologies. She teaches in the Department of Africana, Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at Hunter College in New York after over a decade of research and teaching on Black feminist engagements with Indigeneity and Asian diasporic racial formations. The topic of today’s conversation is her new book, Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis, a groundbreaking investigation of the Caribbean as both an idyll in the American imagination and a dark laboratory of Western experimentation, revealing secrets to racial and environmental progress that impact how we live today. In this episode Dr. Goffe discusses: how the logic of the plantation led to the climate crisis, european colonization of the caribbean, bringing human histories into the origins of climate crisis, the concept of Eden, the invisible laborers in the colonial labor force, her interdisciplinary approach to these topics, how she thinks about the protagonists in the story of the climate crisis, why she sees this book as reclaiming the environmental histories of people of color, and finally she talks about her storytelling lab, Dark Laboratory.