Threat Multiplier takes us onto the battlefield and inside the Pentagon to show how the US military is confronting the biggest security risk in global history: climate change. More than thirty years ago, when Sherri Goodman became the Pentagon's first Chief Environmental Officer, no one would have imagined this role for our armed forces.
Indeed, for much of the twentieth century, the Department of Defense (DOD) was better known for containing the Soviet nuclear threat than protecting the environment. And yet, today, the military has moved from an environmental laggard to a clean energy and climate leader, recognizing that a warming world exacerbates every threat-from hurricanes and forest fires, to competition for increasingly scarce food and water, to terrorism and power plays by Russia and China. The Pentagon now considers climate in war games, disaster relief planning, international diplomacy, and even the design of its own bases.
What was the key to this dramatic change in military thinking? What keeps today's generals and admirals up at night? How can we safeguard our national defense and our planet? No one is better poised to answer these questions than Sherri Goodman, who was at the vanguard of environmental leadership among our armed forces and civilian representatives. In Threat Multiplier, she tells the inside story of the military's fight for global security, a tale that is as hopeful as it is harrowing.
""A memoir by a fighter in a decades-long campaign to make U.S. defense policy take climate change and the environment seriously…. what is distinctive, even special, about Goodman's book is her description of how she moved from academia to Senate staff work to a senior Pentagon position to a perch in the think tank universe. That is a successful career, even a highly successful one, but it is also the sort of trajectory that rarely gets documented…. Goodman's perspective is valuable. It's a reminder that progress can be made, however slowly it may go. More significantly, it's a reminder that progress mostly has less to do with sudden revolutionary change than with the steady work of repeating oneself in nice conference rooms in the hopes of catching the ear of people who can change policy ever so slightly."" "Provides valuable insights on the role of science and technology in the "greening" of the US military...Her accessible writing style and the personal anecdotes she brings to the narrative provide a welcome humanization of the military's work in the context of environmental policy. This book will be an important chronicle of a pivotal period in global environmental and military history." "A thought-provoking and enjoyable read... I challenge anyone to read Threat Multiplier and remain skeptical that militaries around the world need to think about climate change." "The climate crisis has enormous national security implications, and no one knows that better than Sherri Goodman, who long ago coined the phrase 'threat multiplier' to capture the ways this environmental wrecking ball would inform policymakers in situation rooms everywhere. There is no one better to take readers along on the Pentagon's journey wrestling with this new and evolving reality implicating basing, training, peacekeeping, and much more. A must read for everyone who wants to understand why climate imperatives aren't just for environmentalists."---John F. Kerry, former Secretary of State and Special Presidential Envoy for Climate "This is an immensely informative and very important book. The story of how climate change and global security are intertwined-and how the US Department of Defense grasped this reality to become the US government leader in embedding climate-change resilience into its core responsibilities-is told here by a woman whose deep insight and remarkable political skill helped her do more than anybody to achieve this stunning result."---John P. Holdren, Harvard University, forme
