The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - The National Security Risks We're Not Prepared For: Adapting In an Age of Actorless Threats with Rod Schoonover

Episode Date: June 18, 2025

National security concerns have been the invisible hand guiding governance throughout recorded history. In the 20th century, it was defined by a country versus country dynamic: whichever nation was the strongest and most strategic was also the safest. But today, our biggest national security threats don't come from opposing nations – they are "actorless threats" that emerge from the breakdown of the complex systems we all depend on – from the stability of our planetary systems to our intricately complex and fragile global supply chains. In this unprecedented landscape, what is required of us in order to keep our citizens safe?  In this episode, Nate is joined by Rod Schoonover, an expert at the intersection of Earth systems stress and national security, where they discuss the need for the evolution of national defense to address the systemic (and diffuse) threats of the 21st century. Rod emphasizes the need for a reformed security sector that addresses contemporary challenges, like global heating that leads to extreme climatic events, urging immediate action to mitigate risks and enhance stability. Importantly, they also delve into the need for political leadership to embrace complexity and local resilience when tackling these pressing issues. How do we unite against 'actorless' threats, even when we don't have someone to blame for their damages? Where have leadership and governance already begun to adapt to address these existential concerns, and where are we seeing failures? Finally, how could incorporating more cooperative principles at every level of society transform our ability to bend – not break – under the weight of our human predicament?  (Conversation recorded on May 6th, 2025)   About Rod Schoonover: Rod Schoonover is the CEO and Founder of the Ecological Futures Group, Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University, Senior Associate Fellow at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), and Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.  Rod served a decade in the U.S. intelligence community as the Director of Environment and Natural Resources at the National Intelligence Council in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and as Senior Scientist and Senior Analyst in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Before joining the government as a AAAS Diplomacy Fellow in 2009, Rod was a tenured Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. Dr. Schoonover earned his PhD in theoretical chemical physics at the University of Michigan, where he studied complex systems.   Show Notes and More Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.   --- Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future Join our Substack newsletter Join our Discord channel and connect with other listeners

The doctrine of the 20th century was sort of like the game of risk, where you have the map that doesn't change and all the pieces move on top of it. The question is, does it still match the threat landscape of the 21st century that some people, including myself, call these an era of actorless threats, threats without someone to point a drone at, things like climate change, pandemics, ecosystem destabilization, food price shocks. You know, if a foreign invader were burning houses or intentionally sinking whole apartment buildings under mud, we'd have no problem seeing it as a national security issue. But because we don't have those actors, we have difficulty seeing it. And I think that's evidence of a misalignment between doctrine and threat. You're listening to The Great Simplification. I'm Nate Higgins. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment, and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming great simplification.

Today I'm joined by Rod Schoonover, a leading expert in the interrelationship between ecological and national security to explore how our understanding of security. risks is being reshaped in the 21st century, particularly under the strain of increasingly breached planetary boundaries. Rod Schoonover is the founder and CEO of the Ecological Futures Group, which examines the national security and societal dimensions of global ecological change. Rod previously served as Director of Environment and Natural Resources at the National Intelligence Council, as well as senior analysts in the State Department's Bureau of intelligence and research. One of the key things that drew me to Rod and his work was his perspective on one of the

first U.S. investigations into climate change as a national security threat, of which the resulting report remains classified to this day. To me, the continued secrecy of this otherwise open source research document speaks magnitudes about the continued unwillingness of the government to seriously act on ecological security issues, and this is true of both Democratic and Republican administrations. At the core of this, rather serious conversation is a discussion on how we perceive and approach issues of security in the 21st century through an outdated lens of country versus country, rather than recognizing the increasing ecological risks that affect humanity at large as the major security threats that they are.

In my opinion, this speaks to the heart of the species level conversation at which I believe we have arrived. Additionally, if you are enjoying this podcast, I invite you to subscribe to our Substack newsletter where you can read more of the system science underpinning the human predicament. And where my team and I post special announcements related to the great simplification and our content, you can find the link to the subscribe in the show description. With that, please welcome Rod Schoonover. Rod Schoonover, great to see you. Welcome to the show. Thank you. I'm honored to be here.

So you have a unique background that melts together fields of complex systems physics and security, including serving in the U.S. intelligence community for a decade as the director of environment and natural resources at the National Intelligence Council and as a senior analyst at the BUS. of intelligence and research at the U.S. Department of State. So was there a moment when you realized how intertwined Earth systems and national security are? And I guess more broadly, what called you to dedicate your career to this type of work? Yeah, it's a good question. And thanks for the question and opportunity to talk about a lot of these issues that are really near and dear to my heart. I don't know anyone else that's working at this intersection, by the way. It's less of a moment and more of an evolution.

And then I would say there's a pivot right around 2011. And so, as you mentioned, my background is in complex systems physics, which, you know, if you're getting outside of your computer models, your toy models, and looking at real-world applications, you're naturally drawn to climate and ecological systems. And so I was a college professor. That was my career, 1.0. And it turned out that my scientific training,

you know, the ability to talk about complex things, turned out to be valuable when looking at it. a number of emerging security issues. So I landed in the intelligence community, a place I never thought I would ever go. That was not my intent. And so this is part of the evolution. I would say the pivot comes right around 2011

when I come across, which would have been two years old, maybe, the first report on the planetary boundaries framework. And that's when I, you know, I went, oh, wow, I have really personally been underscoping the risk to people and nations. And ecologies and ecosystems and other species. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Right. And when you go, when you effectively change your career to work on climate change, because I never went back to academia. And then you see the, you know, famous to some people. unknown to others' diagram of planetary boundaries, you see these other slices, you know, the one on biosphere integrity and novel entities. And at the same time, I'm inside of a national security apparatus that is, I would say, almost 100% ignorant of that work.

So in 2019, you decided not an easy decision to resign from your position under the First Trump administration. And more recently, you have pushed back against the continued classification of the 2008 intelligence community report that you mentioned on the security implications of climate change. So what are your current thoughts on the climate transparency of the U.S. government writ large. And why is this 2008 report such a critical piece of communication about climate and security? I think it's a remarkable report for 2008. It is the, it's the first time that the U.S. security community, of which the intelligence community is part, takes an issue, takes this issue, and says, this is what we think about it, right? It's the first time.

It outlines, it's, you know, there's geopolitical tensions, national security threats. You know, I don't want to overhype it because, you know, if it were leaked or declassified tomorrow, I don't think a lot of people would be surprised by what it says because there's practically nothing classified in it. This was commissioned and researched and done in a Republican administration, right? George Bush was president then? Yes, yes. And it was welcomed in a bipartisan way in 2008. I'll just note this was a year before I joined the administration.

And so one of the, I think, important things is a process question that turns out to be important, is that, you know, at the time there were 16 intelligence agencies, maybe 17, if you want to count the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. And so in the process of this being the flagship report that the intelligence community gives, it has to be signed off by every intelligence agency. And they all signed off on it. They all signed off on it. CIA, NSA, every single entity. And so this does not belong to one body. Was there prescriptions and remedies, or was it just a state of the scenarios and what we see scientifically is going to happen to climate in the United States and the world?

Yeah, I think that's an important distinction because I think, you know, it goes to what is the value add of the intelligence community. It used to be secrets and clandestine information. But that kind of information is, we're in a different information landscape. And increasingly, the value proposition of the intelligence community is the fact that it is not policy prescriptive. It does not say, here's the problem. And here is also how we should fix it. right so you know a policymaker whether it's a secretary of state you know president can turn to their intelligence community and say just give me the facts time and emissions make our situation worse and the amount of warming that's built into the pipeline is not only worse but substantially worse than it was in 2008 and yet 17 years later we're removing climate change from textbooks

and funding for climate science and NASA and NOAA and other areas are being, you know, handicapped with funding. So we're going wildly in the opposite direction, yes? I would say that we are substantially increasing our risk from climate change because we are at the same time not reducing the hazard part of risk. we're also decreasing our ability to watch it, to monitor it. So when you say we're increasing our risk, you don't necessarily, or I don't think, I think specifically you don't mean our ecological risk or our economic risk. You mean our national security risk. I do.

I do mean our national security risk, I would say our global security risk and our risks to human security as well, all of them. Do you want to just give an overview of that? I think just talking about how risk is, you know, multifactual, it's got a hazard piece, it's got an exposure piece, the vulnerability piece, and the response piece. And we are effectively underestimating every single one of those. For example, the resistance to believe in climate change for whatever reasons, reduces our response.

When I travel internationally, which I did twice last year, actually, it seems like the recognition of the risks of climate change and the broader ecological planetary boundaries are much more widely known abroad, obviously in Europe, but also in Asia and Australia. Why is the U.S. different there? Is it because of the misinformation, disinformation? Do you have any speculation on that? I do think there is some degree of narrative capture from, I would say, industrialized misinformation and disinformation.

But I also think our standard of living buffers some of the effects. You know, when people are affected by climate-linked disasters, we think of them. as unlucky rather than the victims of a failure. Yeah, market failures. Yeah, casualties of market failures. Well, and I would say security failure, right? I mean, like, I think of, right, the Los Angeles wildfires and the mudslides in western North Carolina, where my in-laws live.

You know, we call those natural disasters. but they're also maybe better thought of as security failures because these are knowable, right? So this isn't so much solving climate change and making the coming decades and centuries and millennia less warm than the default. There's a little of that, but most of it is how to make our, from a national security standpoint, our society more resilient, more rugged, more prepared for, what's likely in the pipeline, yes? Yes. I mean, I think that's, you know, there's a responsibility to act on information. And, you know, that, you've captured it well.

I never used the word solve climate change. I never use that terminology. It's navigate. Yep. Right. It's not solvable. It's not solvable. That gets to my work on the economic superorganism, that we're part of a system that has a

metabolism. So let's go out to national security itself because you worked in that field for a long time. How has the definition and meaning of national security changed between the 20th century and the 21st century? And what are the dominant factors now shaping it? Yeah, it's a good question. It's an important question. The doctrine of the 20th century was sort of like the game of risk, where you have the map that doesn't change and all the pieces move on top of it. But we don't have that map anymore. We don't have that planet anymore. Right. Our planet is fundamentally different. And so, uh, so this doctrine and architecture that was produced in the 20th century, the question is, is it still, does it still match the threat landscape of the 21st century that,

you know, some people, including myself, called these, uh, an, era of actorless threats, right? Threats without someone to point a drone at or an actor that you can listen to. These are things like climate change, pandemics, ecosystem destabilization, food price shocks. So it just short-circuits our current architecture, which is designed to point things at other entities. And our... ill-suited for these things that, you know, that are, these threats that are diffuse, systemic, and deadly, right? And so what's really kind of ghoulish is if a, you know, if a foreign invader were doing the things, right, burning houses in the Western United States,

or intentionally sinking whole apartment buildings under mud. But it was a foreign actor, we'd have no problem seeing it as a national security issue. But because it's not, we don't have those actors, even though the outcome is the same, the same number of, you know, people died, same economic disruption, we have difficulty seeing it. And I think that's evidence of a misalignment between, doctrine and threat. So what, in your opinion, how has the recent administration been doing, adapting to this,

this change in definition or meaning of national security? And how could they be better? You know, the last administration had a number of security officials talking about climate change as an existential risk, right? Sometimes saying the most important security threat facing the United States. But then when you saw the org charts, organizational charts, essentially no difference. Change is hard, especially in our system of government. But over time, we have to recognize, I would say, a substantial failure in, um, in looking at the threat to people and nations from climate, from climate change.

So from a national security perspective, there's the adaptation and the mitigation component. On the mitigation component, isn't this a giant prisoner's dilemma that there's different nations that have different cost-benefit analyses? And effectively, on these issues, and we're going to. get to planetary boundaries in a second, but can there be national security without broader global security? And if not, how do we foster global security? It's hard for me to imagine any meaningful, sustainable national security without the global peace. These threats transcend borders. And we have a mess threats in the 21st century that we don't, that we didn't before. And ignoring them or, you know,

the, the danger of applying a national response to what is a transnational problem looms. When we met in person, we talked a lot about this, that climate gets a lot of the press, but the risks are way beyond climate. Yeah. So getting to your work on ecological security, can you explain what that term means in a practical sense? Yeah, so just very short, just practically means incorporating the integrity of Earth systems

from the climate to the biosphere, freshwater, soil, oceans, directly into, national and global security strategies, doctrine, architecture. And I know you've written some papers in that recently, which we'll put in the show notes, but what are some of the biggest categories of insecurity caused by climate change and ecological degradation? Yeah, so, you know, it's interesting. When you look at the types of what I call security outcomes or insecurity, you know, Earth system stress is not inventing new ways. of, or new forms of insecurity, right? It's still food and water insecurity, health insecurity,

economic insecurity, political instability, which I think about a lot, conflict. But the drivers are different. And arguably, since they're not just coming from foreign adversaries, but from the system itself, the possibility, the likelihood of intertwe. if you want polycrisis, you know, an ecologically embedded polycrisis, right? The numbers of simultaneous outcomes and the interconnectedness of stress and outcome make a security picture possibly unlike humanity as faced before. And so, and you can go, you know, you could look at soil, stress, you know, pollinator, collapse, you could look at harmful algal blooms, which are almost always conceptualized as

water quality issues instead of an ecological canary that's almost certainly more destructive than most people think. And so there's just a lot of different ways to get to the same types of insecurity that, you know, we've seen in past and the present. Is there some term in your field where all the science points to probably mitigation isn't going to work, and just all of our efforts from a security standpoint have to be on adaptation? Is there a terminology? Yeah, like, I mean, at some point, I would assume that there's a spectrum of we need to make this, better than the default by policy or intervention or rebuilding or whatever. But at some point,

like reading the tea leaves of the science on some of these planetary boundaries are X, Y, Z is going to unfold for sure in the coming decades. And so do we just give up on the mitigation and put all of our efforts into adaptation? Is there a terminology or concept of that phenomenon? I've referenced a responsibility to act on information, which is part of the code of national security. There's also arguably, and I'm not sure this is a direct answer to your question, but, you know, we often hear about the precautionary principle being used in terms of environmental policy. But I think there's a precautionary principle for security as well, that we know things, and I'll just take biosphere, you know, biodiversity loss and biosphere destabilization, right?

I think most people know that that is not going to be good for society stability. I think we still haven't articulated the pathways by which it is, harmful, right, in ways that the security world writ large can, can uptake it. But we know enough to prevent more risk from emerging. Right. We know enough. So that's what I mean by the precautionary principle for security. We don't need more studies. We need more action. Here's a question. I have, Rod. You said there's 16 or maybe 17 intelligence agencies in the broader umbrella. Is part of this like a hot potato phenomenon that there's no one entity that's actually

responsible for this because it's a novel entity, the risk that ecological security, which is really novel given the past of our species, of our country, everything. So is it like no director or deputy director wants to own this because it's a huge risk to their status and their domain? And so because no one stands up and owns it, then nothing happens. Is some of that going on? Well, certainly. That's always part of it. But this is one of the reasons why I went back to the National Security Act of 1947. And here we are 80 years later. If we, just a theoretical, just a thought exercise, if we were going to rebuild the national security community,

like they did in 1947, to match the threats of today, would it look like this? Right. And especially if there was significant understanding of the climate and ecological disruption and the effects of these things on nations and people, would we structure the national security community in such a way where these things would be so difficult to uptake?

Does the national security apparatus and all the 17 agencies, do they have any involvement in things like the Paris Agreement? And, you know, the Paris Agreement, we've withdrawn from that twice. So, I mean, I'm just curious what your thoughts are on, on was the agreement of success and also do the intelligence agencies have any say or involvement in all that? So the involvement of the intelligence agencies is purely informational, right? It's a question, you know, if the Secretary of State might say, is this country legit when they're coming to us and saying this, or are they trying to, you know, do a big rug pull, right? And so, you know,

that part, those questions are geopolitical in nature, and that's, you know, a large part of the intelligence community works on answering those geopolitical questions. But just in terms of, you know, this agreement, I'll just say I'm a fan of the Paris Agreement. I think it's one of the first truly 21st century accords. It's a fundamental break from the past. The reasons why it's a fundamental break are almost certainly from broken American politics, but nonetheless, it comes at this global compact in a different way. It's not you, it is, it's not based on legal frameworks.

It's based on voluntary. I would say the biggest problem I have with it, you know, Again, you mentioned apart from focusing primarily on mitigation rather than adaptation, especially early on, it's housed in the system

that does not let the Paris Agreement work, right? The UN consensus process holds it back from success. The COP system has been arguably co-opted by, you look at

the presence of fossil fuel industries at the cop itself. It's hard to argue that that hasn't held it back, held back the Paris Agreement. The architecture of the Paris Agreement, I think, is quite interesting because it has built in

adaptive response. Most treaties are not dynamic. This one is. And that's it has this five-year ratchet mechanism. It's in the DNA of the agreement. One of the problems is if the withdrawal of the United States

substantially weakens this agreement, then the agreement wasn't very robust to begin with. And so I think that looking what should something look like in the 21st century and, you know, unhousing it from this process, I think, somehow would be a right direction. So as someone who advocates for security sector reform, what changes would you suggest, Rod, on how to make our military and intelligence agencies operate better or? appropriately in the face of climate and ecological threats. Right, so there are little tweaks and then there's the big one.

The little tweaks are you need to build systems thinking, strategic warning, strategic foresight, earth scientists, they need to be inside the security community, especially since the threat landscape is changed. changing so quickly, right, from, so when I was at the National Intelligence Council, I was the climate person. I was also the water person. I was also the wildlife trafficking person and the fisheries person and the food. It was good for me and good for my understanding, but this is no way to organize a security community that is right-sized and aligned. So how much of that is just a value system of our current as yet to be ecologically mature species and culture.

I think it's strongly connected, but it's also this inability to see that the system we have in place isn't working. There's only so many tweaks on the knob that you can make before you see, oh, well, maybe the whole thing is a problem. And, right, we've, we've gone through times in this country where we have really remade what government looks like. And so 9-11 was seen as such an acute change that we restructured much of the government. And I would argue that especially after four or five years of quote-unquote, natural disasters and ecological security outcomes roll through the system, maybe the time will be right, especially after much of the government has been dismantled, that maybe it's

time to rethink the whole thing. So paint us a picture in that scenario of what a security sector that's truly adapted to 21st century ecological risks might look like in reality. You would need to break down the bureaucracy and the bureaucratic silos. You would have to, you know, I think a lot of people think, well, let's move climate and ecological disruption into the Department of Defense. I don't think that's right. I don't think that that entity is the thing that would strengthen our security and strengthen ecological security. I think you would need to rethink the executive branch.

What does it do? And I'm not saying it's the only value because I think equity and dignity are two other values, but go through the departments and maybe rethink departments. Maybe there should be a department of ecological security that focuses on ecological stability as a thing to pursue. So I think this is what leadership in the 21st century looks like. Who focuses on the ecological stability piece and who helps the international community get there. I think it's going to require more than just a department of ecological.

security or whatever. I think different parts of government, whether it's our current Department of Labor, Homeland Security, will need a piece of how is this contributing to ecological stability. So I don't really think that you can do it in a bureau or a department that is ignored by everyone.

And so how does it come about, it comes about, right? This is one of those places where leadership matters, where someone says, you know, what would the founding architects of the United States be doing if they met in a beer tavern in 2025? What would they be thinking needed to be created from scratch? The founding architects of the United States lived and designed their systems and laws and values on an ecologically unful planet. So they would have to really be educated and informed with modern physical complexity science that is in your purvey and become educated in systems thinking and become aware. Like if they were time travelers and could take a...

a one-month overview of all the planetary boundaries and everything that's happening and why, without having the political influence that modern-day people move up the status hierarchy in the halls of power, then maybe they would have something insightful to say and suggest. What are your thoughts? Well, I mean, we invented systems thinking for a reason, right? I often marvel at the fact that we have this great achievement, but then we don't use it very well. And so, you know, in this Hollywood script, I would find, you know, the equivalence of today, right? Not time travelers, but the person in, you know, Modesto, California, and, you know, wherever who are young and ready to

rethink, right, rethink what security means. So let me move to a tangent. Okay. I believe that every year that passes on average, more and more people will come to understand and it will be undeniable unless there's a giant cognitive dissonance which precludes people from adjusting their priors.

but it will become undeniable that we're warming, it's accelerating, and this has dire consequences for the planet. So it's my belief, even though I'm not a fan of it, and I have huge concerns about it, I think geoengineering is going to be chosen by governments around the world. And it is sometimes touted as a critical component to bringing down Earth's temperatures, but there are also many serious unknowns,

when doing this type of thing, interacting with the natural processes of the biosphere. So that itself is a novel security risk. And so have you thought about that? What sort of new security risk might geoengineering create beyond those already in the pipeline from climate change? Yeah, and I think it's a really good question. I wish a lot more people were aware of these kinds of discussions.

And, you know, I find myself in a strange position because of, you know, I think I differ a little bit from a lot of scientists, a lot of Earth system scientists on this. I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that we will use it, but if so, we really better understand it. But then, you know, a lot of Earth system scientists say, well, that's arrogant. We can never. Why is that arrogant? We can never understand the Earth system well enough to toy with it, even though we've been joined with it for, you know, 200 years. And so I think, you know, the security risk, you know, you can just rattle them down.

You know, there are the geopolitical types that, you know, who gets to set the temperature, what if one country decides it's going to partake in engineering and geoengineering? By the way, the U.S. security community has thought about geoengineering quite a bit. But what is always remarkable to me is it was always cast as something that some other actor in the world would do. some, you know, either some rogue billionaire or rogue state. But I think if you asked the world which country is the most likely to partake in geoengineering, the fingers would be pointing at the United States. And so I think it's really important to understand the science behind it.

and then use the science to assess the risk. Because I think a lot of risk right now is being assessed from a values standpoint, that there's too much uncertainty, and maybe that's true. Let me take a different angle on security and ecology risks. I mean, it almost seems like there's a whack-a-mole dynamic here going, that we see a risk and then we see some responses, but the responses themselves create other risks. For instance, how do ecologically sensitive practices like mining for rare earth metals,

which are going to be necessary if we have something related to our current consumption levels using solar and wind and geothermal, et cetera, how does that fit into the story? Well, it goes back into, right, are we going to learn the lessons of the 20th century? Are we just going to pursue rare earth minerals or critical materials at large? Are we going to pursue them with the mindset of the 20th century? We will end up with those same kinds of resource nationalism and geopolitical tensions, right? You can see them emerging now. Or do you change the way that you're thinking about it, right?

Um, that's easier said than done. I, I, I, but there are a few times in human history where you get a chance to rethink what's how we do things. I think we're in one of those areas if we have the courage to look at it that way. So what, um, taking off your, your, um, your security hat and putting on your complex physics, uh, complex systems. and physicist hat, like, what issue of all the planetary issues or pick a couple are you most personally concerned about and why? I'm very much concerned about novel entities in terms of plastics and microplastics. I think we have conducted this enormous gamble that the microplastics that permeate everyone listening to this podcast.

It's almost certainly in every physiological system in that body. We have gambled that there is no effect on our behavior, on our health, and that we won't pass any of this to our children. I think that is almost certainly incorrect. I worry a lot about the effects of climate change on a lot of non-weather issues. We always so often talk about climate change in a very meteorological sense, right?

Storms and heat waves, but if you understand climate, you understand that the temperature of the planet is changing. And so that means any physical, chemical, biological, ecological, agricultural, industrial process that's temperature dependent can be moved. And so there's a whole lot of non-weather phenomena that the security community usually just ignores that may be even more consequential than the ones that we usually rattle off, right? And so, you know, I worry about the effects of climate on infectious disease, effects of temperature on anti-microbial resistance, the effects of nitrogen and phosphorus imbalances in our hydrosphere in the oceans. I think we probably haven't framed that risk particularly well, especially, you know,

I don't know if you, if any, if you or anyone have seen the news reports about crazy sea lions coming out of the ocean to attack surfers. No, I haven't. You know, there's this compound called domoic acid that is excreted by some, harmful algal blooms. And, right, it's most famous for producing the effect that was, you know, turned into a movie, the birds by Alfred Hitchcock. But you're seeing a lot of strange effects on marine organisms that, you know, I think are indicative of parts of ocean stress that we don't usually think about.

And so we think a lot about, you know, dead zones, or I do, I think a lot about dead zones and the effects on fisheries and the teleconnected effects on food and, you know, and livelihoods. But, you know, these intersections between different stressors, I think are, I wish this were a much, more robust avenue of research, although at this point, a lot of that very research is being

undercut in the United States. So we've covered a lot of topics, and each one of these topics could have been its own podcast, but with this complex matrix of issues that we've alluded to, what advice or warnings would you, Rod, give to political leaders right now who are. are either navigating or will have to navigate these things under their watch. Well, I would say probably the number one is to embrace complexity rather than simplify it. You know, the linear security solutions will fail against complex interconnected threats. If you understand anything about polycrisis, is that a new approach.

is needed. And what that approach is, I don't think we know yet, but we should figure it out. I think we need to prioritize things like resilience and more than resilience. Resilience isn't enough, right? It's, there's the prevention, there's a building anti-fragility, which I think is doable in a social system, more than a physical system, although our ecosystems do it. I think we need to really focus on foresight because once you're in an era of poly crisis, your options are very limited, right? You're just in an almost purely reactive mode. So trying to understand the risk landscape better, I think there needs to be a lot more investment in scoping out what the next couple decades look like.

first step is the U.S. government needs to hire a lot more complex systems scientists. Well, certainly, but they also need, it's funny. I'm a physicist, right? And the fact that I was charged with things like wildlife trafficking just shows you are training, right? If you look around the intelligence community, for example, and look at what. what the dominant academic background was, or is, it's government or international relations or something like that. Is that the right training? That's always needed.

But shouldn't we have, you know, a workforce that is cognizant of the moment? The government is a microcosm of the population. So we need to have ecological systems education in our culture, in our country, and then maybe it will percolate up to the decision makers in Congress and in the intelligence community. Maybe or maybe we do it faster. Yeah, maybe we. We have to do it faster. Yeah, we do.

Yeah, so you mentioned the super organism before, right? And so, which is, I think, a really interesting way to conceptualize, you know, a lot of the issues that we're looking at. at. But one thing that you know from studying complex systems is that there are different classes of superorganisms, right? There are the mindless type, right? But then there are some that have a collective intelligence. And there are some, you know, some others, you know, whether you're looking at jellyfish or ant colonies or what, it turns out that changing the nature of the superorganism is changing the rules by which they interact. That's what drives them into different structures.

And so that, again, it's easy to say, but it's probably easier than trying to direct the superorganism towards the common good. It's easier to rewrite the rules from which the superorganism emerged. So I think we're in a place where we can legitimately talk about those few lines of code in our political and social systems that produce this superorganism. Interesting. And it's an urgent necessity to do so, right? This we are in a rather urgent predicament.

Here, here. Thank you for your lifetime of professional service on these issues. If you have a few more minutes, I'd like you to take your security hat and your complex systems hat off and just put on your human American citizen hat on. And I'll ask you some questions I ask all my guests. what would be your personal recommendation to someone listening or watching this show right now that they could do in their own lives this week, this month, to help address some of the issues that we discussed or more broadly the economic, ecological, systemic risks we face? Well, one, I would say, is educate yourself deeply, stay informed, don't disconnect. I would say build resilience locally in whatever way that looks to you.

That is the way that the world builds resilience. It's not top down. It is bottom up. And we're in a moment where bottom up is the most important approach. And I would say also as we're looking at opportunities, to build, you know, build what we want going forward is, I think we really need to examine a lot of the cognitive biases that all of us have. As we look for ways forward, there's a persistent tendency for us to think, since it is the way it is, that's the way it's supposed to be or will continue to be. but if we have the courage to face the moment we're in,

then we may be able to get out of this mess. And are you your former college teacher, or do you still teach college? I do. Yeah. You teach where? I teach in Georgetown. And what is the name of your class?

I have two classes. One is climate and climate change, where I talk about how the climate works and how it is. changing. This is in a non-major's class. This is really the only reason I'm teaching it, because I'd like future leaders of the world to know about climate science. And then my other class is introduction to ecological security, where I talk about ecological change as a security issue. So how would you change the advice that you just gave to our listeners to adapt and

and be for 19, 20, 21-year-olds, your students. What sort of advice do you have for young people? Don't let anxiety paralyze you. There is a lot of anxiety. I think it's well-deserved anxiety. I would say, stay curious, right? The, I would, it goes back to this, this, I said to my class on the very last day,

because I've been struggling with how do I talk to my classes at this moment. Because this year 2025 was foundationally different than 2024. Everything was different, right? Georgetown is in Washington, D.C., and this place where I'm in Capitol Hill right now is changing remarkably. It's personal, it's political. but, you know, prepare yourselves for the opportunities of the 21st century. We are, I would say, this is the first time in my lifetime that I have seen such transformative change happening. It's not necessarily in the right direction, but it is modeling, oh, things

don't have to be incremental, right? Because incremental in many ways is the same as non-action. So prepare yourself. I think a lot of great things can happen if we have the courage to make them happen. What do you care most about in the world, Rod? My family, I think everyone says that. I think my country, my black guitar that mocks me for not playing it as much as I should. I find myself writing dystopian analyses a lot more.

But I think that method, you know, that thing that we all need to stay human and sane. I increasingly write poetry, some of it dystopian. You could write dystopian songs and play them on your black guitar. I could. I could. I bet they would be big hits for our moment. So if you could wave a magic wand and there was no personal security risk to your person, what is one thing you would do to improve human and planetary futures? You know, there's a dark answer and a light answer, and I'm going to go with the light answer, because there's a dark one too. Well, the viewers are going to want to know what the dark answer was. I'll let you do both if you like. Since it's a magic wand, and we don't

have to talk about policy, you know, I'd instill empathy across humanity. I think the inability to truly understand and care about each other's suffering and the suffering of other living entities is at the root of many of our problems, not all of them, but global empathy would just profoundly transform the way we engage with each other. These are the rules of the game that could be rewritten and you have a different superorganism emerge. we relate to each other and to the natural world and connection to the web of life said differently. Exactly. And then the dark version is really take on the moneyed classes that have extracted so much wealth from the planet and people and return that wealth to the people who is extracted from.

That won't solve climate change because then the people that get the resources are going to still buy things that require coal, oil, natural gas, and materials. Possibly, unless you rewrite the rules of the program. Yes, coupled with that. So if you were to come back on this show in the future, what is one topic that you have especially expertise on that you could give a deep dive on that's relevant to human futures, as nerdy and as esoteric as it might be?

I think really, you know, one is, what should the intelligence community look like? A lot of people have never met anyone from the intelligence community. What does it do and what should it do is one. But I think the better one is, what does a version of the planetary boundaries framework look like when it is reconceptualized for not human existence, but for this kind of security that I've been talking about, right?

When you look at these thresholds, bad things happen well before you're at those thresholds. And what I like about the planetary boundaries framework is that it categorizes these stresses. But there are some others that's not inside of that because it's not intended to capture every piece. And so there's something that I have been calling nature's contribution. to security, right? How do you think of ecosystem services and analog to that, right? So how do you think about,

yes, you can look at the economic benefits of mangroves, but what are the security benefits of mangroves? How do they stabilize societies, right? These are things that are not captured necessarily in an economic frame, right? What are the benefits? to stability. We might have to do that because I would like to know how mangroves stabilize societies. Rod Schoonover, thank you so much for your time today and thank you for your important work.

Thank you. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please follow us on your favorite podcast platform. You can also visit thegreat simplification.com for references and show notes from today's conversation. And to connect with fellow listeners of this podcast, check out our Discord channel. This show is hosted by me, Nate Hagen's, edited by No Troublemakers Media, and produced by Misty Stinnett, Leslie Batlutz, Brady Hyann and Lizzie Siriani.