According to an article that came out on March 9, 2013 in the Boston Globe the Commander of the U.S. Forces Pacific Admiral Samuel J. Locklear III met privately with security and foreign policy specialists at Harvard and Tufts on March 7 and March 8 before making a public statement declaring that climate change is the greatest security threat of our age and that it “is probably the most likely thing that is going to happen . . . that will cripple the security environment, probably more likely than the other scenarios we all often talk about.’’
The timing for the consultations with high level figures in the security field is significant in that March 7 was the exact date on which Director Pastreich’s article “On Climate, Defense Could Preserve and Protect, Rather Than Kill and Destroy,” which suggests that the military must be reinvented from the ground up to respond to the challenge of climate change came out on the front page of the popular political blog “Truthout.”
This article was in fact the first such article in a major media outlet to make a systematic argument for a comprehensive restructuring of the military in response to climate change.