Excerpt from Dark Laboratory by Tao Leigh Goffe, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Instead, I learned to let go, to surrender to my surroundings. I became adaptive and iterative in my approach, which led me to become the founder of my own initiative, the Dark Laboratory. My lab is a space for research on climate, race, and technology, and, more important, it is a philosophy. We at the lab understand that climate crisis cannot be solved without solving racial crisis. The two are inseparable. With over thirty members worldwide, from Helsinki to Hilo to Portland to New York, we collaborate on a wide range of creative storytelling projects centering on Black and Indigenous ecologies.

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. As it often occurs with genocide, there is simply too much evidence. Those who have benefited from the crimes of colonialism refuse to be convinced. The weight of transatlantic history and its impact on our current climate crisis is overwhelming. The evidence is so proudly and meticulously preserved. It becomes liberating then to evaluate not what lies enclosed within the walls of colonial architectures, but to begin to comprehend the significance of what is outdoors. What was stolen from the natural environment and can still be salvaged. Ways of life, scientific traditions, philosophies of environmental coexistence. The magnitude of what was stolen in the past is only a small fraction of what can be restored in the future. There are unborn worlds of scientific possibility from multiple traditions with answers, strategies, and solutions for tackling the climate crisis. Denial of the colonial condition, denial of the origins of the crisis, limits our imagination and how to live after. Denial clouds our memory of the thriving world markets that functioned before the advent of modern capitalism.

Excerpted from Dark Laboratory by Tao Leigh Goffe. Copyright © 2025 by Tao Leigh Goffe. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.