On the Verge – An Interview with Tanya Wyatt on Environmental and Wildlife Crime (018)

In this episode, Dr. Natasha Bajema, Director of the Converging
Risks Lab, moderates a discussion about environmental crime and
wildlife trafficking and their connection to security. The
discussants are Dr. Rod Schoonover, Head of the Council on
Strategic Risks’s Ecological Security Program, and Dr. Tanya Wyatt,
Professor of Criminology at Northumbria University in
Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the UK. This is part of a series of
discussions about the concept of ecological security. Dr. Wyatt’s
research focuses on green criminology with a specialty in wildlife
crime and trafficking, non-human animal abuse and welfare, and
their intersections with organized crime, corporate crime, and
corruption. Professor Wyatt also researches crimes of the powerful,
particularly industrial agriculture and wider issues of pollution.
Before coming to CSR, Dr. Schoonover served a decade in the U.S.
intelligence community, first at the State Department’s Bureau of
Intelligence and Research and later at the National Intelligence
Council, working on the national security and foreign policy
implications of environmental and ecological change. To fill an
urgent gap in understanding and addressing the security
implications of global ecological disruption, the Council on
Strategic Risks (CSR) has significantly expanded its Ecological
Security Program over the past months, with the help of a grant of
close to $1 million from the V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation. The
program, housed within CSR’s Converging Risks Lab, addresses all
elements of global ecological disruption, including biodiversity
loss and beyond, caused by drivers such as habitat change, direct
(and often illegal) exploitation of organisms, climate change,
pollution, and the spread of damaging invasive or otherwise
destructive organisms.  To read more about our work on
ecological security issues, please read CSR’s landmark ecological
security report The Security Threat That Binds Us and the
programmatic and policy responses recommended in that report, as
well as the recently-published report Societal and Security
Implications of Ecosystem Service Declines, Part 1: Pollination and
Seed Dispersal.