Robert Edward Turner III is a different sort of eco baron: wealthy, privileged, controversial, famous, and infamous. His philanthropy sets a very high bar for other Americans with big bank accounts, as he has fashioned himself into the nation’s most generous and flamboyant donor to public causes. Yet he is known to the American public far less for his groundbreaking wildlands preservation, restoration, and re-wilding than for making provocative and occasionally outrageous public statements. It wasn’t his large private conservation projects—which dwarf whole countries’ efforts—that generated headlines in 2008. It was his off-the-cuff remark on a public television show that created a firestorm when he predicted that continued inaction against global warming would doom humanity to social decay, starvation, and a great many deaths in thirty or forty years. Then, in a deliberately over-the-top aside, he suggested, “The rest of us will be cannibals.”
His many detractors pounced, and they included conservative activists, one-world-government conspiracy theorists, haters of Jane Fonda, and deniers of global warming. Turner’s gift for public hyperbole puts him in the limelight, but it also tempts his critics to write him off as a liberal lunatic: There’s a reason, after all, that Ted Turner is nicknamed the “mouth of the South.”
But there’s also a reason that Doug Tompkins thinks Turner could go down in history as “his generation’s giant of wildlands philanthropy,” and that Mike Phillips, who was once the National Park Service’s expert on wolves and now works for Turner, says that the founder of CNN, the twenty-four-hour cable news network, has surpassed Rockefeller “with a body of conservation work that exceeds any human who has ever lived.”
Ted Turner owns more land in America than any other single individual—about 2 million acres, most of it made up of fifteen immense ranches sprawled across six states, primarily in the West. When the federal government needs help reintroducing nearly extinct species to their old ranges—wolves, ferrets, bears, trout, woodpeckers—it turns to Turner. His mission is as simple as it is unprecedented: As much as practically possible, he is attempting to return his lands to the natural state in which they once existed, before man came along.
“We’re trying to replace as many missing pieces to the environment as we can,” Turner says. “We’re trying to save what we can of the natural world.”
Ted Turner, who turned seventy in November 2008 and had a net worth of $2.3 billion, has a mind-boggling résumé as businessman, media mogul, outdoorsman, environmentalist, and philanthropist, not least because he lost most of his fortune—“Six to eight billion, depending on what time of day it is,” he recently quipped—in a disastrous corporate merger with tech giant turned dinosaur, America Online (AOL). It was one of very few big missteps in a remarkable career, and though it slowed the pace of his philanthropy (his Turner Foundation had to retreat from $45 million in grants for environmental groups in 2000 to $8.6 million for a variety of environmental and social causes in 20071), he says he still spends more on his wildlands conservation and philanthropic grants than his annual business income brings in, routinely maxing out his tax deductions for donations. He figures he’s given away $1.5 billion since the mid-1990s. In 1998, he pledged an unprecedented $1 billion donation to the United Nations to support a broad mix of causes, including his two highest priorities: nuclear disarmament and the battle against climate change. The donation was made in installments, with the billionth dollar delivered by Turner’s nonprofit United Nations Foundation in 2006.
Turner is a typical self-made man. He was a rebellious child—a fact that surprises no one who has known him as an adult—and he was shipped off to various boarding and military schools. The discipline imposed on him there (one school lost count of his demerits) did little to suppress his defiance of authority and conventional wisdom. He was expelled from Brown University in 1960 for sneaking a woman into his dormitory, and he came home to work for his father’s billboard company, Turner Outdoor Advertising, in Savannah, Georgia. When his father committed suicide in 1963, Turner, then twenty-four, took over the business, which was worth about $1 million, though it was heavily in debt. Turner discovered that he liked being in charge, threw himself into the work, and built a media empire. At the time, he summed up his philosophy in the least altruistic terms imaginable: “Life is a game. Money is how we keep score.”
In 1970, Turner decided to expand from billboards into television by buying two properties: a small, money-losing UHF television station, and the broadcast rights to a library of vintage black-and-white movies and old television shows. At that time, television was dominated by the three broadcast networks and their local affiliate stations, and the recently added UHF stations were obscure and hard for viewers to find. But Turner became one of the first to parlay a small station into a national cable operation, offering old movies and cartoons to an audience hungry for alternative programs. Turner was one of the first independent broadcasters to use satellite technology, and then the explosive growth of the cable industry, to reach a huge viewership. In the mid-1970s he used his cable profits to buy the Atlanta Braves baseball team and the Atlanta Hawks basketball team and added their games to his national broadcasts, transforming his operation into the nation’s first “superstation.” The Turner Broadcasting System—TBS—was born.
In 1980, he launched Cable News Network, which industry insiders predicted would be a disaster. No one wanted twenty-four-hour news, it was said. Cocky, blustery, and profane, Turner told the so-called experts to go to hell. CNN made Turner a billionaire and permanently ended the predominance of the network nightly news. He then purchased MGM/United Artists Entertainment and baffled the entertainment industry by selling the Hollywood studio back to its original owner. He’s crazy, the experts said again. Go to hell, Turner answered again. For he had kept one piece of the operation—the studio’s enormous library of films, including such classics as The Wizard of Oz, Citizen Kane, and Gone with the Wind (which came with the actual Academy Award statue the film had won). Turner had anticipated the value those films would have in the new but rapidly expanding market for home videos. And his new Cartoon Network cable station now had a huge library of classic cartoons, making it a destination for children around the country. He made $120 million from that film library in the first year. In 1995, he merged his cable, broadcast, film, and sports holdings with the media giant Time Warner, becoming its largest individual stockholder, a vice chairman, and a member of the board of directors—and multiplying his wealth five times over. Most of that money vanished after he went along with the merger that combined Time Warner, the “old media” giant, with “new media” AOL, the former king of dial-up online access, in 2001. The ink had barely dried on the merger when it became clear that it was a terrible mistake: AOL was dying, losing subscribers from its online “walled garden,” being made irrelevant by the advent of easy access to the World Wide Web and the rise of broadband Internet service. Stock in the company, briefly dubbed AOL-Time Warner, tanked; “AOL” has since been erased from the company name, and Turner left the company.
Along the way, Turner married three times, most recently the actress and activist Jane Fonda (they were married in 1991, divorced in 2001); had five children, all of whom are involved with their own environmental activism, as well as sitting on the board of the Turner Foundation; skippered the winning yacht in the America’s Cup competition in 1977; gave the Atlanta Braves’ manager the day off and managed the team himself for a game; was barred from the Braves’ dugout by the commissioner of baseball; founded the Goodwill Games; and outraged conservatives and churchgoers by calling Christianity a “religion for losers”—a remark for which he later apologized. He then joined a $200 million partnership with Lutheran and Methodist church groups to create an antimalaria program in Africa. What he has seldom revealed was that he lost his faith at age twenty, when his teenage sister died of lupus after a long illness; Turner had prayed for her daily for years and felt he had been a dupe. His daughter, Laura Seydel, once said he felt driven to save the world because he had decided God wouldn’t do it, though in recent years he has said he has begun to pray again. “It doesn’t hurt,” he allows.
Over time, his philosophy that “life is a game” seemed to shift, and he began to speak of doing something meaningful with his wealth. He claimed a new motto: “I don’t give till it hurts. I give till it feels good.” Turner had for many years defined himself as “a screaming ecologist and a wild-eyed do-gooder,” and he stepped up his efforts in the 1990s, when he began buying land in the West and decided that restoring it to its natural state was his calling. Much of his ranch land has been placed in conservation easements that ban most development.
In 1997, he created the Turner Endangered Species Fund and hired Mike Phillips away from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to be the new project’s first director. Phillips, a biologist from Montana, was the first project manager of the successful program to release gray wolves into Yellowstone National Park, at a time when the wolf was virtually extinct in the wild. Turner’s youngest son, Beau, is the fund’s president and manages the wildlife programs. The Turner Endangered Species fund specializes in reintroducing endangered species, including wolves, bears, and other predators, to their original habitats. The fund also focuses on the preservation of two vital ecosystems: grasslands and pollinator corridors (habitats for migratory doves, bats, hummingbirds, and butterflies) that are collapsing from development and pollution, though they are essential parts of the food chain. And at many of his ranches, projects for eradicating nonnative plants species and restoring native ecosystems are also in progress; they include the planting of thousands of native tree seedlings.
Turner’s Flying D Ranch, 113,000 acres in southwestern Montana, is the largest private landholding in the Yellowstone Park ecosystem, where wolves, elk herds, and grizzly bears safely roam and hunt, moving unimpeded between his property and the adjacent sprawling public forests and parkland. Turner had all the old ranch fences pulled down to allow wildlife to move freely, and he incorporated his ranch into the Yellowstone-to-Yukon Conservation Initiative, an affiliate of the Wildlands Project. The initiative seeks to stitch together 1,800 miles of public and private land into a network of wildlife corridors and reserves from Big Sky country to the Canadian tundra—an enormous international zone of sustainable, unsullied nature intended to resemble what the region looked like before the West was settled.
Turner has been something of an absolutist on this point of restoration: In partnership with the state of Montana, he is reintroducing the nearly vanished westslope cutthroat trout to its native Cherry Creek, which runs through his ranch and onto adjacent public lands. The westslope is Montana’s state fish, but its numbers have dropped drastically because nonnative rainbow and brown trout have been placed in Montana waters by fishermen. The hardier nonnative species crowded out the Montana fish. Because the Flying D’s fifty-mile portion of Cherry Creek is blocked at one end by a waterfall, state biologists realized it would be possible to isolate its length from other portions of the creek with nonnative fish, making it a perfect laboratory for restoration. Turner, an avid fly fisherman, agreed to the project, even though it meant the nonnative fish on his property had to be killed with a quick-acting, specifically targeted, fast-dissipating poison before the westslope could be placed back in Cherry Creek. This poisoning caused an understandable uproar among locals and led to five years of lawsuits, but Turner, supported by the state of Montana, was adamant: he would put nature back the way it was supposed to be.
In New Mexico, Turner’s 250,000-acre Ladder Ranch is a similar laboratory of competing interests. First he reintroduced the imperiled desert bighorn sheep to his lands. Then, after the sheep were well-established, wolf packs were re-wilded there, too, even though some of the very expensively re-wilded sheep would become wolf food. But that’s what real nature is about—predator and prey, completing the cycle, according to Turner.
The Ladder Ranch is a major connector in another arm of the Wildlands Project, the Sky Islands Wildlands Network, which straddles Arizona, New Mexico, and northern Mexico. Sky Islands is an attempt to link wildlife corridors, reserves, and “islands” of mountainous habitats spanning four diverse ecosystems: the northern temperate Rocky Mountains region, the southern subtropical Sierra Madre, the Sonoran Desert, and the Chihuahuan Desert. The area is a major repository of biodiversity, including half the bird species in North America. Ladder Ranch also has a captive breeding facility for Mexican wolves destined for release on Turner’s land and federal lands. Some of Turner’s wolves have been reintroduced at Kieran Suckling’s and Peter Galvin’s old stomping grounds in the Gila National Forest, amid protests and threats from locals. The re-wilding of wolves, which Turner considers an essential part of restoring a healthy landscape, is very controversial among ranchers, who fear their livestock will be killed and their livelihoods threatened. Turner has called for cooperation to preserve an important endangered species, but it has been hard to come by, and some reintroduced wolves have been shot. In 2007, an entire reintroduced wolf pack vanished from the Gila. Turner, meanwhile, has expressed the hope that he will hear the howl of a completely wild wolf at the Flying D before he dies.
At the Vermijo Park Ranch along the New Mexico–Colorado border—Turner’s largest property holding, at 580,000 acres—prairie dogs rule. Colonies of these highly social burrowing rodents—typically exterminated as pests by ranchers—are allowed to thrive and dig everywhere at Vermijo. They are not officially designated as endangered, although prairie dogs now live on only 2 percent of their once enormous range across America’s grasslands, which themselves are imperiled. Turner lets the prairie dogs flourish at the ranch because of their role as the primary prey for an animal that is nearly extinct in the wild: the black-footed ferret. The ferrets are raised wild on the ranch and used in reintroduction programs throughout the West. The wild-raised ferrets do much better once released than ferrets raised in zoos. The prairie dogs and ferrets are part of a larger effort to restore prairie landscapes; biologists working for the Turner Endangered Species Fund are also studying the possible reintroduction on the ranch of imperiled falcons, condors, spotted owls, and the Rio Grand cutthroat trout.
The ranch houses another of Turner’s captive wolf breeding facilities, this one for the Southern Rocky Mountain wolf, a species being re-wilded slowly in the Rockies. Ranchers in New Mexico have vigorously opposed the reintroduction, citing livestock deaths in the Yellowstone area after wolves were reintroduced there, and making Turner something of a pariah among some of his ranching neighbors. Turner didn’t help his case by saying in 1997 that raising cattle in arid environments such as New Mexico was foolish and unsustainable. “He has thumbed his nose at the custom, culture, and ethnic diversity of the state,” the head of the New Mexico Cattle Growers said in response.
But Turner has a point: The cattle industry is responsible for 18 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide (not so much from the animals themselves, but from related deforestation to expand pastures and to grow feed crops, as well as the energy-intensive process of producing chemical fertilizers used for that feed).2 In the last five months of 2007 alone, more than 1,200 square miles of Brazil’s rain forest were burned and clear-cut to make room for feed crops and pasture; Brazil’s president imposed a state of emergency to halt the destruction. Beef, like oil, is subsidized by the U.S. government, which makes it economically viable to raise cattle in arid climates such as New Mexico, and enables America to eat the most beef in the world: 5 percent of the population consuming 15 percent of the meat.3 If Americans would simply reduce their meat consumption by one-fifth, according to an analysis by two geophysicists—Gidon Eshel of the Bard Center and Pamela A. Martin of the University of Chicago—this would have the same effect as if all Americans traded in their cars for superefficient, low-polluting Priuses.4
Although he hasn’t changed his mind about the environmental problems associated with the beef industry, Turner has stopped publicly criticizing cattlemen, instead offering a personal counterexample. He has removed cattle from the ranches he buys and instead raises bison there—more than 50,000 head, the largest herd in America—and uses their meat at his chain of restaurants, Ted’s Montana Grill. Buffalo are indigenous to the plains and prairies of the West, Turner says, and do not inflict nearly as much damage on the ecosystems as cattle herds do. Through his restaurant chain, which had grown from one restaurant in 2002 to more than fifty in eighteen states by 2008, he has been championing some modest green business methods—alternative energy, conservation, even talking a manufacturer into once again making straws out of paper instead of petroleum-based plastic. He says he hopes to demonstrate that operating ranches and businesses in an environmentally sound fashion, including nurturing endangered species on private lands, can be a profitable enterprise. He allows limited hunting and fishing on his properties, for a fee that starts at $400 a day per guest, and that can top $12,000 for a weeklong hunting excursion on the breathtaking Vermejo Ranch.
Apart from conservation efforts on his ranches, Turner has dispensed as much as $60 million a year since 1990 to environmental groups in the United States. Like Doug Tompkins’s Foundation for Deep Ecology, he has often sought effective, upstart organizations to support financially, as well as larger, more established groups. For many years, the former director of Greenpeace USA, Peter Bahouth, administered the Turner Foundation grants program, though he has since moved on to direct the U.S. Climate Action Network. At one point, Turner was supporting nearly 500 different environmental organizations—among them the Center for Biological Diversity at a time when it was struggling to keep afloat. Turner has doled out grants to groups and programs protecting rivers, otters, wolves, bears, dolphins, rain forests, ducks, sea turtles, whales, pine trees, manatees, monarch butterflies, jaguars, grasslands, cactus forests, and salmon—to name just a few—along with groups promoting renewable energy, environmental justice, bicycle riding, the Boy Scouts, and an end to mountaintop removal methods of coal mining. The description of programs seeking funding from Turner has filled as many as three bound volumes each year.
Bahouth would spend part of the year researching and visiting environmental groups that had applied for grants, then assembling those volumes, which were, in effect, an analysis of the state of American environmentalism, along with the pros and cons of supporting each applicant. The volumes would be distributed to Turner, his five adult children, and (while she and Turner were married) Jane Fonda, so they could vote on which projects to support. Each board member also had a discretionary fund for his or her own pet projects; these included, for example, sustainable home building groups and a local “riverkeeper” group.
Typical of the organizations Bahouth discovered and the Turner Foundation supported was Ozone Action, an obscure outfit advocating causes related to climate change. It was run by John Passacantando, who later took over Bahouth’s former position as director of Greenpeace USA. The Turner Foundation gave Ozone Action $170,000, in part to fund its hounding of presidential candidates on the campaign trail in 1999 and 2000. Ozone Action representatives would show up at campaign events wearing big hats shaped like smokestacks and carrying signs asking, “What’s Your Plan?” The goal was to jump-start candidates into addressing climate change, a topic that was being avoided like the plague during the campaign, even with Al Gore leading the Democratic primary races. Sometimes the Ozone Action people were ignored; at other times the Secret Service ejected them. But after seeing them at half a dozen events, Senator John McCain tired of being harangued and invited them on board his campaign bus. The conservative Arizona Republican listened to their pitch about the need for urgent action on climate change, asked his staff to check out what they had told him. Pretty soon, a senator who hadn’t spent much time or political capital on the issue of global warming was holding hearings, sponsoring legislation, inviting Ozone Action’s director to testify, and, for his presidential run in 2008, developing a program for dealing with climate change that many environmental organizations considered flawed, but vastly better than those of his competitors in the Republican primaries.
“So now people say, hey, McCain is pretty good on global warming,” Bahouth chortles. “Why is he good? Because we funded a group that bird-dogged him on the campaign trail. What’s that investment worth?”
The billions that Ted Turner lost because of the disastrous merger with AOL forced him to cut back his grants program, and to transform the once wide-open application process into an invitation-only approach. When he broke the news to his children, the fund’s trustees, he wept.
He says he has no plans for retirement in his seventies. He has hinted that he will donate most of his vast real estate holdings to become “national parks or something” after his death; whatever form this donation takes, he has vowed that the bulk of those 2 million acres—more, if he can swing it—will be permanently preserved as wilderness. Between his wildlands conservation project, his work for endangered species, and his eco-philanthropy, Turner is arguably America’s most prolific environmentalist. He has received accolades, awards, and honorary degrees, and has often appeared on magazine covers, including Time Magazine’s Man of the Year cover in 1991; but at times he seems to be portrayed and perceived more as robber baron than eco baron, viewed with suspicion and partisan distrust.
The “cannibal controversy” was typical. It arose from a couple of sentences during an hour-long television interview in April 2008 with the PBS host Charlie Rose. In that interview, Turner discussed his views on the most critical world problems, which he ranked in importance: proliferation of nuclear weapons, global warming, overpopulation, ocean and air pollution. In his typically colorful, hyperbolic manner, Turner portrayed these problems as a grave threat that could bring down civilization. But he also argued that resolute action to solve these problems would create an unprecedented opportunity for jobs, wealth, and security:
“Fossil fuel’s day is over. We’re poisoning our children and ourselves…. We have to mobilize the same way we did when we entered World War II in 1941. We have to fully mobilize everything we have in changing the energy system over. It is going to be the biggest business project in the history of the world. Fortunes, billions of dollars, are going to be made. Hundreds of thousands of people are going to be employed. We’re going to have clean air. We’re going to have so many benefits, it’s not going to cost us anything once we get going….
“Not doing it is going to be catastrophic. We’ll be eight degrees hotter in…thirty or forty years and basically none of the crops will grow. Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals. Civilization will have broken down. The few people left will be living in a failed state—like Somalia or Sudan—and living conditions will be intolerable. The droughts will be so bad there’ll be no more corn grown. Not doing it is suicide. Just like dropping bombs on each other, nuclear weapons, is suicide.”
The next day, over and over throughout the media and the Internet, the snippet about “cannibals,” which had lasted only twenty seconds, was replayed, the focus of coverage of Turner’s remarks. He was talking “wild-eyed lunacy,” one columnist wrote. Another called him “crazy Uncle Ted.” He was said to be spreading “neo-atheist-Marxist ideas.” Within three days, a Google search for Turner’s name coupled with the word “cannibal” produced 10,400 hits.
Aside from removing the remark from its context, which would have made it clear that Turner was trying to paint a worst-case scenario that he did not believe would ever occur, the commenters failed to realize that Turner was alluding to a recent best-selling book, Collapse, by the evolutionary biologist and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jared Diamond. The book analyzes the causes behind the fall of past civilizations, then contrasts those factors with the challenges facing humanity today. Easter Island was a particularly vivid example cited by Diamond: a once vibrant society that exhausted its resources, devolved into warring factions, and finally resorted to cannibalism as the only alternative to starvation. Human history offers many such examples of resource depletion followed by the fall of cultures and descent into cannibalism—it’s ugly, it’s unpleasant, no one likes to think about it, but it happens to be true. Turner was simply suggesting that history could repeat itself.
None of his critics and none of the news reports on the interview included what Turner had said next to Charlie Rose, when he made it clear that he did not believe his apocalyptic scenario would ever come to pass, expressing a hopeful outlook to explain why he felt compelled to expend so much of his wealth on environmental causes:
“We’re in a tough situation, but we can play our way out of it…. I love this planet and it’s worth saving. I know we’re the same people who did the Holocaust, but we’re also the people who did the Mona Lisa and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. This world, we can’t turn it into a cinder, for ourselves and for our children. And it’s worth fighting for.”