On Nov. 13, Park University hosted Retired Brigadier General W. Chris King, Ph. D., who gave a presentation titled Climate Change: A Critical U.S. National Security Assessment and Strategic Whole of Government Challenge. His full list of qualifications and areas of expertise took two minutes to read entirely.
“What you can take away from that introduction is I’m really old,” laughed King. “If I had read that sign on the way in, ‘Retired General Lecture,’ I would’ve gone the other way.”

Nonetheless, the full auditorium fell attentively silent as King shared his knowledge and insight gained over a half-century and shared, for the last ten years, as dean at the Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, KS.

“That’s where young army captains and majors come if they’ve been successful and they study, not at the tactical but the operational and strategic level of thinking about war,” said King. They study with 125 officers of all nations; 163 nations have attended there. We’re learning as a military that not every problem can be solved by the army.”

To echo this point, he quoted former U.S. National Security Advisor, Colin Powell.

“The army is a great hammer but not every problem we have is a nail,” he quoted Powell as saying. King went on to point out that his perspective was just one piece of a larger picture.

“I look at it from a security and defense standpoint,” said King.

“What are the things that threaten our peace and stability as a nation when we look at it and use strategic thinking as a military? But the solutions are much bigger than that. It has many components for the department of security and defense, but it’s a whole government problem and it takes everybody who sits on the cabinet must bring their resources together to find the right solutions,” he said.

In keeping with that theme, King also pointed out that climate change is not the only example of an environmental threat to peace and stability. For a less controversial example, he pointed to cases in Africa and Asia where countries building dams and collecting increased amounts of water on their own portions of rivers can cause water shortages and related tensions with their neighbors downstream. King presents these as clear, relevant threats to world peace. The solutions to these problems are baffling enough, without obfuscating the dilemma by questioning the cause as well.

“My research since 1993 has been to try to see the correlation between environmental parameters and stability and security,” said King. “The one thing that the social science community and the physical science community agree on is, the one independent variable in this whole process is population growth.”
King’s presentation condensed the work of a career into an hour. However, the moment that sent a murmur through the crowd was a quote from current Secretary of Defense James Mattis.

“Climate change is impacting stability in areas of the world where our troops are operating today,” Mattis wrote in response to questions during his confirmation hearing.

King followed that remark up with a solemn mission statement.

“Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the maintenance of a stable environment capable of providing for people’s basic human needs in a substantial way, he said.

As the hour ended, the question arose: what action can be taken now?

“Are we a democracy?” asked King. “It has to start with the people. It’s not an impending problem, it’s a current problem. It’s only going to magnify.”