Books of Interest
Website: chetyarbrough.blog
Dark Laboratory
By: Tao Leigh Goffe
Narrated By: Tao Leigh Goffe
Tao Leigh Goffe (Author, PhD from Yale, award-winning writer, theorist, and interdisciplinary artist, raised between the UK and New York City with a UK citizenship.)
Goffe has written a book about the complexity of discrimination and global warming with the risks they entail for humanity. She offers a sociological and environmental perspective.
Goffe’s book is an introduction to what she envisions as “The Dark Laboratory” to address inequality and global warming.
Puerto Rico
Stories of mongooses and marijuana confuse the clarity of Goffe’s subject. She addresses immersive technologies like virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) to help people understand the impacts of climate change and inequality. The hope is that books like hers and education of the public will change human behavior. She writes of a mongoose introduction to Puerto Rico which becomes an invasive species. She also writes of colonial exploitation of island natives who plant, harvest, sell, and distribute legalized marijuana.
The analogies she chooses are marginally relevant, but they are a distraction. The fundamental points of unintended consequences of an invasive species on the environment and colonial enslavement can be more impactfully explained with concrete evidence of ecological damage and employment inequality in native lives.
The introduction of the author’s book is disappointingly vague, but Goffe’s life experience, her advanced education and perspective are shaming and anxiety producing. The shaming and anxiety come from knowing that being white gives one advantage in life. That advantage has admittedly been squandered by human inequality and pursuit of wealth and power at the expense of the environment.
Listener/readers are introduced to slang for minorities by Goffe that are not widely known.
Commonly known and despicable derogatory names are wetback, chink, gook, redskin, and the “N-word” for people who do not appear white. However, Goffe notes names like maroon and eleven-o’clock minorities are less known. A maroon is a member of a community of runaway enslaved Africans in Jamaica. An Eleven-O’clock minority is someone who is considered an incomplete person because he/she is 1 hour short of 12.
The earth’s environment is in crises while many foolishly diminish human equality while ignorantly pursuing self-interests. The irony and incongruity of environmental destruction and inequality is that we are all in the same boat, living on spaceship earth. Goffe’s point is that society chooses to despoil earth for ephemeral profit while causing global warming and discriminating against minorities only because people are different. The “Dark Laboratory” is about the world climate crises and race relations.
Puerto Rico is a petri dish of Goffe’s “Dark Laboratory”. It shows how earth’s environment is being destroyed and how neglect of human equality has impoverished native island cultures.
Goffe argues (and hopes) with the help of storytelling (education) about human equality, technological innovation, and ecological care, the world can become a sustainable haven for humanity. However, Goffe takes two digressions that confuse, if not diminish, the importance of environmental degradation and human inequality.
Goff shows how islands are a microcosm of the world environment and a perfect example of what is wrong with the ecology and economics of the world.
REVIEWS AND VIEWS OF LIFE 