In September 1987, when Sherri Goodman joined the US Senate Committee on Armed Services, she was its youngest professional staff member and the only woman. Goodman would go on to help forge the nascent fields of environmental and climate security. In her new book, Threat Multiplier: Climate, Military Leadership, and the Fight for Global Security, she tells the inside story of what she calls the “military’s environmental awakening.”
One of Goodman’s first responsibilities was overseeing the nation’s nuclear weapons plants at a particularly fraught moment. Within a year of joining the Armed Services Committee, the New York Times was running front-page stories about safety lapses at nuclear weapons plants on an almost weekly basis. Goodman’s work was thrust into the Congressional hot seat. She was tasked with drafting legislation for a new oversight mechanism, which eventually became (after a legislative wrestling match with the Governmental Affairs Committee) the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board.
In 1993, Goodman was appointed the first-ever deputy undersecretary of defense (environmental security). She oversaw the Defense Department’s environmental programs, including the projects to clean up pollution at the roughly 100 military bases on the list of toxic Superfund sites. Many of the stories from this period of her career are about fighting tooth and nail for barely adequate funding from defense officials who would rather spend dollars on more equipment or weapons than on cleaning up their messes—even if those messes posed environmental health threats to American citizens. “There always seemed to be a faction who saw environmental stewardship and military readiness as opposing forces, instead of two sides of the same coin,” Goodman writes.
While at the Pentagon, she had a front-row seat to the political fight over whether the United States would sign on to the Kyoto Protocol, the first international treaty to set legally binding targets for greenhouse gas emissions. Climate change had become a fraught, polarizing issue in American politics. (President Bill Clinton signed the treaty but Congress never ratified it, and President George W. Bush later withdrew that signature.)
Goodman led the development of the Defense Department’s first climate change strategy, focusing on achieving emissions reductions without compromising military might and readiness. When she left the Pentagon in January 2001, her team fêted her with gag gifts like a plaque that said, “Mother of Environmental Security” (she was eight-and-a-half months pregnant at the time).
Goodman’s work in that arena was far from over. While working at the Center for Naval Analyses, she convened the CNA Military Advisory Board, a group of former senior (three- and four- star) military leaders, to study the security implications of climate change. It was in a meeting of this group that Goodman suggested “threat multiplier” as a way of describing how climate interacts with security concerns, and the phrase was included in the 2007 report, “National Security and the Threat of Climate Change.”
In the following interview, Sherri Goodman discusses that legacy, the military’s mixed record on climate and environmental issues, the need for strong and enforceable environmental regulations, and the extent to which the United States is prepared for climate disasters.
Jessica S. McKenzie 