Infrequently Asked Questions

Rod Schoonover is a scientist, a former intelligence official, a Native American, and a father, and we asked him about how all of those perspectives form his views on climate change -- and the new administration.

As a scientist and former intelligence executive, Rod said climate change is deeply important to him. He's been "uplifted by some of the language coming out of the leadership of the intelligence community, including Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines on Earth Day." (Haines called climate change an "urgent national security threat" during the April 22 Leaders Summit on Climate.) As a father, Rod described testifying publicly to Congress with a picture of his one-year old daughter on the desk in front of him to "calm my nerves and remind me of the high stakes of the issue," he said. And as a Native American, Rod hailed the "palpable sense of pride and jubilation that swept through the Native American community" following Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland's confirmation.

Rod went on to describe his hope that Director Haines will "take a serious look at how climate change is prioritized in the IC [intelligence community], since analysis on the topic has plateaued somewhat over the past few years." Scientists, Rod explained, "could help with that mission, but there are very few in the [intelligence] community."

​Schoonover noted that he himself was drawn away from his "cushy academic job" to the intelligence community by the lure of working on climate change. He also resigned his position because of climate change, when Trump Administration officials tried to suppress his testimony on the topic.

Now running his own consulting firm, Rod recently published a major report, The Security Threats that Bind Us: The Unraveling of Ecological and Natural Security and What The United States Can Do About It, which looks at climate change in a broader context. In this report, Rod wanted to "articulate the security dimensions of biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, biotic mixing, and other aspects of ecologic disruption." Rod described how ecological disruption and climate change, although connected, are commensurate as risks to security. The problem, however, as Rod sees it, is that "these ecological stresses are largely seen through an environmental sense rather than as inputs to societal and security concerns like pandemic risk, corruption, crime, and political instability."

We asked Rod about the international mechanisms for responding to and reversing ecological disruption. He responded that such mechanisms don't connect to policy outcomes all that well, which Rod attributed partly to the "comparatively low priority of issues like biodiversity loss in our own policy prioritization." for example, "it is unlikely we'll send the Secretary of State, much less the Secretary of Defense or the Director of National Intelligence" to the Convention on Biological Diversity later this year in China--a Convention Rod describes as "crucially important."

Rod added that these issues--"climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution and plasticization--are just really hard problems to begin with." To get people and nations "off this trajectory," which Rod described as "entrenched over a hundred years," will require serious change. "In the most dire trajectories," Rod added, "we're talking about some very unpleasant outcomes for human civilization." But America could help, according to Rod, by signing onto treaties like the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and the Convention on Biological Diversity, both of which Rod noted are "long overdue actions."

To close things out, we finally asked Rod to don his lab coat and describe what he would prioritize if he were shaping the research agenda on these issues. Rod mentioned the ecosystem services that economists use to "determine financial losses accrued from damage to natural systems--such as soil quality regulation, pollination services, and provisioning of water, food, and land," describing how he's "interested in understanding how ecosystem service breakdown contributes to political stability, conflict, pandemic risk, and other security outcomes."

Another area where Rod sees a need for more research in this space is the "societal consequences of ecological regime shifts." That is, "the abrupt changes when an ecosystem or biome is suddenly, and often irreversibly, moved or pushed to a new state, such as the collapse of a kelp forest or the salinization of soil." To give a concrete example, Rod explained the process of "savannization," or the "ongoing transformation of Amazon tropical forests to savanna conditions," which has "direct implications for millions of people, in addition to the adverse effects on the climate system," he said.