Last Stand: Ted Turner's Quest to Save a Troubled Planet

by Todd Wilkinson

  “Under global warming scenarios,” Miller says, “what we call drought may become the new norm. It’s an issue that is of great concern to Ted and it’s one of the reasons why he’s been so vigilant not only in pushing Congress to act on controlling CO2 emissions but increasing his stake in alternative energy as well.”

  Amid the thousands of pages of spreadsheets that have line item expenses laid out for every ranch, Miller and Hansen track costs for everything from the estimated amount of grass needed for the bison, to engine replacements in pickup trucks to property taxes to health insurance for employees. Row after row of minutiae.

  Turner places an emphasis on frugality. “But I can honestly say I’ve never felt pressure from Ted to cut corners in order to try and turn a profit,” Miller says. “He knows that our emphasis is to try and make all of the ranches sustainable by taking care of the land, the bison, and the people. That’s why he hired us.”

  Over the twenty years of Turner’s bison operation, only fairly recently have bison returned a multimillion-dollar profit, aided by rising market prices for bison meat (about double the going rate for beef nationally) and rising demand for bison (aided mightily by the heightened profile of bison created by Turner’s creation of the Ted’s Montana Grill restaurant chain).

  Before bison pulled their own financial weight, the diversified income streams from the ranches—commercial hunting and fishing, sustainable timber harvests, and oil and gas royalties—took up the slack. The natural gas royalties at Vermejo Park Ranch in New Mexico are noteworthy in one major regard—Turner doesn’t own those mineral rights under the ranch, putting him in the company of thousands of private property owners who are at the mercy of split-estate laws granting energy companies access to their land without payment of royalties or say in whether energy development can occur. But when Turner acquired the ranch, he and his legal team negotiated a progressive mineral extraction agreement that not only dictated environmentally sensitive development of the natural gas by the owner of the gas rights, but also granted Turner a royalty on production. That mineral extraction agreement has served as a national model for government agencies, environmental groups, energy companies, and other private property owners attempting to minimize the ecological impacts of rapidly growing natural gas extraction.

  Just as development need not result in massive sacrifice zones, so, too, do preservation and conservation not mean the ability of a landowner to generate an income.

  “When Ted attached a conservation easement to the deed of the Flying D, he voluntarily accepted upper limits on the number of animals that could be grazed in order to protect the health of his grasslands,” Miller says. “Part of that means setting aside a percentage of the range to feed public wildlife such as elk. Could we be running more bison on the Flying D and the other ranches where there are no easements? Probably. But Ted’s not interested in maximizing profit if it comes at the expense of other values.”

  The ranches are operated by Miller as a confederation of properties under the jurisdiction of individual managers he has hired. Each is allowed to creatively manage his property, so long as he keeps the triple bottom line in mind. Rather than having supplies shipped in from distant cities or countries, Turner has instructed managers to, whenever possible, funnel as much business into local towns. His commerce is significant. The triple bottom line is a principle that encourages business to be approached with broader and longer-term thinking than just focusing on short-term profit or loss. The triple bottom line balance sheet strives to deliver economic profit, ecological benefit, or impacts that are benign, and impart benefits to local and regional communities in terms of quality of life. “How do we save the world?” Turner asks. “The triple bottom line is an important tenet.”

  Miller says Turner is keenly aware that his legacy, everything he’s tried to do with his ranches, will be undermined if they aren’t break-even. Running them efficiently, affordably, and sustainably is perceived as a gesture toward the next generation—his children and grandchildren.

  “I don’t believe that ranching is an either/or proposition,” Turner says.

  Roughly 4,400 ranchers, located in every US state and Canadian province, raise bison. And each year, about sixty thousand bison are processed in North America, a number that continues to rise. But to put it in perspective, Carter notes, the beef industry butchers 125,000 cattle a day. Dineen adds: “As a point of comparison, the total output of bison annually is .15 percent of the beef industry.”

  Flying largely under the radar of public awareness, and as opposed to the cattle industry, the bison industry has voluntarily embraced a system for source verification, led by its largest producer, Turner, in concert with other members of the NBA. “The industry realizes the best way to protect itself is by being vigilant with how ranches are operated, the cleanliness that producers use to process their animals, and those whom we select as our wholesale and retail partners,” Dineen of Rocky Mountain Natural Meats says.

  Turner and McKerrow have told their waiters at Ted’s Montana Grill to take pride in the fact that when diners ask about the birthplace of their bison filet or burger, they can say there’s a good chance—one in four—it was grown on a Turner ranch.

  “[Turner] is pushing for transparency, and he’s not operating his lands with an environmental deficit on his books. He’s building green capital. There are some environmentalists who haven’t caught up to the pioneering course he is blazing and they need to take a second look,” Carl Pope, former executive director of the Sierra Club, says.

  “The bison, in the way Ted is ranching them on his own land, pays for itself. I am a fan of what he is doing, not a critic. If he wanted to turn them into cattle and treat them as such, he would raise cattle instead. I don’t see him undermining the conservation of the species. He is raising the bison’s profile. He is using market forces to enhance their abundance and along the way educating millions of people about the ecological value of having them back in the landscape. Next to maybe Jane Goodall and chimpanzees, name another species that has this kind of champion.”

  “At some time in the relatively near future, we will achieve a ‘balance’ between what we are consuming and the capacity of the earth’s ecosystems to provide those needs, although under existing models of production and consumption, it is likely to be far different and cause far more suffering than we are presently willing to admit,” suggests Paul Hawken in The Ecology of Commerce, his classic book about triple bottom line accounting. “But rather than look at that balance point as a zero-sum outcome that is distantly achievable, a restorative economy means thinking big and long into the future.”

  Scaling to achieve greater measures of economic and ecological efficiency is no different for a rancher or restaurateur than it is for a mom and pop retailer peddling a product, or a promoter of wind energy, or a clothing maker like Yvon Chouinard of Patagonia, Doug Tompkins of Esprit, the late carpet manufacturer Ray Anderson, or a large multinational like General Electric headed by Jeff Immelt—all of whom have joined Turner in touting the green revolution.

  Dineen says Turner’s uncanny understanding about how markets work has influenced him and his decision to expand by betting on the value consumers place on peace of mind in knowing where their food comes from. “One of the things I’ve learned from Ted, and he is a master at it, is that good ideas work when you are tenacious and hang in there.”

  Turner started placing bison on his lands because he loves the species. Anyway he can, whether it’s touting the health benefits of eating bison, realizing potential financial dividends by raising them, or employing them as allies in healing natural landscapes, Turner says it fuels the same objective: bringing more back to the wild. It’s led the Turner organization down some fascinating rabbit holes.

  In 2006, and in concert with the Wildlife Conservation Society, Turner offered up Vermejo Park Ranch to host a gathering of the
leading world authorities on bison and conservation. From that meeting, an action plan was formed. The goal was to get wild, free-ranging bison herds, owned and managed by the public, redistributed across as much of their former range as possible.

  At a subsequent Denver conference sponsored by the Wildlife Conservation Society, which some called a flashpoint for igniting “the bison renaissance,” various scenarios were advanced, practical as well as lofty. One environmental activist spoke of wanting to see tens of thousands of free-ranging bison thundering down a prairie slope in the backdrop of a spectacular sunset. She saw it as a hook for a new era of ecotourism. Travelers from around the world would come, she said, to experience eastern Montana and Wyoming, the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas, just as large numbers of well-heeled adventurers flock to the Serengeti Plain of Kenya and Tanzania.

  It’s not an uncommon vision of bison nirvana, and one that was once shared by a younger Ted Turner. He dreamed of being so successful in business that he could own large pieces of land and fill them with free-roaming bison. But as attractive as the notion might be, and as Turner discovered, there are a number of problems with free-roaming bison. They are social herd animals, for one thing. They move in groups across landscapes, and they prefer open, lower-elevation areas in winter. Some of the major busy highway thoroughfares in the West run through agricultural valleys where bison would converge. In those places, it isn’t practical or safe to have unfenced bison herds flanking highways or interstates.

  But because there are many remote, sparsely populated sites, the ideal persists, and has its traceable roots in the vision of two controversial figures, Frank and Deborah Popper. In 1987 the Poppers caused a sensation when they authored an academic paper advocating for a plan they called “the Buffalo Commons.” Noting that the treeless interior West was emptying of people due to economic realities, and noting as well the lack of agrarian sustainability, the proliferation of pioneer-era ghost towns, and the troubling draining of the Ogallala Aquifer beneath the Great Plains, they postulated a notion that perhaps the ecological and economic fortunes of the prairie could be revived if large bison herds were allowed to roam free again. They suggested that old homesteads could be purchased by the government and used to expand government landholdings. This, predictably, ignited a firestorm, burning hottest within the circles of government conspiracy theorists who believed Buffalo Commons was a ruse for a land grab. The Poppers received death threats. They were maligned as eastern elitist extremists, and told not to set foot in the West.

  As part of Turner’s voracious appetite for reading, he studied the Poppers’ overview of Buffalo Commons and asked all of his ranch managers to digest it. While he applauded the Poppers for thinking big and rallying behind bison, he didn’t believe it could work as proposed. “I think the federal government has other more urgent spending priorities,” Turner says. “And even if it didn’t, it would never have the resources to buy enough private land to make Buffalo Commons function the way it is explained. If conservation must always rely on government stepping in, and short of nationalization of all land which is a terrible idea, there will never be enough money available to save all the wildlife and landscapes in need of saving.

  “I’m a believer in the private sector stepping up and having citizens or business become stakeholders and partners. I’m not against the government, and I’m definitely in favor of restoring bison, but I believe in private enterprise. I think it’s more effective, more efficient, and makes things happen faster than government bureaucracies can. If the market is responsible for environmental destruction, I believe it can also be used as a force for good.”

  The Poppers have come to agree with Turner about the advantages of employing private-property, citizen conservationists rather than using government intervention. They count themselves among his admirers. “I think one of the lines of argument we’ve heard is that you won’t save an animal unless it has commercial value. The ongoing fear was that if bison had commercial value they’d be turned into cattle equivalents. Another premise is that bison on ranches aren’t truly ‘wild,’” Deborah Popper says. “But it all depends upon what role the rancher envisions for bison in the ecosystem. The relationship between bison and people has always been complex. What’s nearly unique with bison, and made vivid by how Turner approaches them, is that they can be commercial and mythic and wildlife symbols all at the same time. I see them as a point of convergence, not divergence, for both indigenous and non-indigenous peoples. The only other animal that comes close to meeting this profile is salmon in the Pacific Northwest, Canada, and Alaska.”

  “‘Wild’ is a construct,” says Mike Phillips. “I think what most people mean by wild is not how an animal behaves but rather whether it is mostly left to its own devices to handle the challenges of nature and whether it is part of a public herd and therefore owned by citizens. Ted owns his bison herds because, for him, it was the fastest and most effective way he had to grow a herd and address the wrongs that he thought had been committed against the species.”

  “When we originally proposed the idea of Buffalo Commons in the 1980s,” Frank Popper says, “we assumed there could be a federal solution whereby public lands could easily be repopulated with bison. But that was then, and it was also pre-Turner, and we didn’t anticipate the impact that someone like him and other buffalo ranchers and tribes and various non-government groups could have. It’s not necessary for government to do it, certainly not government alone. Promoting bison conservation through public and private efforts gives the movement a balance and flexibility to move forward with an array of options that didn’t exist before.”

  With affiliations at Rutgers, Princeton, and the City College of New York, Popper explains Turner to his college students this way: “I really see Turner as fitting into the mold of an old-fashioned Romantic capitalist. He likes turning things that are considered broken around, be it baseball teams or relations with the Russians. The spirit was there in the Goodwill Games, the Braves, and in CNN defying its critics when he said the news business needed to exist in real time.”

  He adds, “I’m trying to think of someone else who qualifies with such a benevolent spirit. Bill and Melinda Gates and Paul Allen and Warren Buffett qualify as great philanthropists but there’s no one who, as an enormously successful, self-made capitalist, has made giving away money to environmental and humanitarian causes a standard part of his operating principle. A sense of improvisation has been a hallmark of whatever he’s doing. He’s been a catalyst for altering how an entire nation thinks about buffalo.”

  Turner’s entry into the bison ranching business did more than alter his perception of stewardship; it altered the perception of others toward him. And while it may have alienated him from the regional livestock industry, it also (unknown to him at the time) gave him a new identity, Bison Baron.

  Dan Flores told me, “One of the little-grasped policy decisions made by the federal government and its advisors, the American Bison Society, in saving buffalo a century ago was not allowing them to be wild animals across western public lands. Among all American fauna they, along with wolves and grizzlies, are an exception in that regard. I’ve liked that Ted has removed fences and attempted to let his herds be wilder. And that he has helped get us to a point where we have more bison now than at any time since the 1880s. Ted has brought bison back into American consciousness and that allows us now to ponder taking next steps.”

  Montanan Danny Johnson, who grew up a skeptic of Turner only to become the current Flying D manager, says that Turner’s earlier aspersions against cattle need to be considered against his record of stewardship, an impulse that is kindred to the beliefs of the good stockmen he knows. “Ted’s definitely of the more rural mindset than the city one,” Johnson suggests.

  Turner is increasingly viewed as an architect of the New West. “I think a lot of us know better now, but the lag time for most of the population to being more cri
tical about history seems to be a long one. This is where my idea about our need for new stories, new heroes comes in,” Flores says. “History doesn’t seem very useful to me when all it does is glorify the past. Being critical about the past is how you learn from it. It may take another generation and another step away from frontier veneration, but my own sense is that Ted Turner’s bison narrative, still being written, will be regarded as one of the new paradigms that changed history.”

  As Flores makes clear, Turner is not just a buffalo rancher trying to reconcile ecology and commerce. Indeed, conservationist and Blackfeet Indian Curly Bear Wagner used to call Turner Wovoka, after the Northern Paiute mystic who invented the Ghost Dance, who hoped that the white outsiders would go away and buffalo would miraculously return.

  Wagner was a traditionalist. Before he died in 2009, he told me that the promise of Wovoka survived in Turner. “He is a powerful man,” Wagner said. “He understands bison as an animal of sustenance that feeds the soul and the body.”

  Wagner smiled when he was asked if Turner could pass for a Native medicine man. “No,” he said, “but Ted has land and money and, while I may never fully understand it, he has an attachment to buffalo. It isn’t phony. If there’s anything we Indians recognize in white people, it is when they are being deceptive and insincere. Ted Turner isn’t that way.”

  A century and more after Wounded Knee, after the promise of the Ghost Dance died under the bullets of Hotchkiss guns, Ted Turner continues to work to restore bison to the American West.

  One evening along a bluff at the Flying D headed toward dusk, he stood thinking of the Blackfeet hunters, of the bison they had once stalked and killed. A few fences from the D’s cattle days remained in view, but most of them had been removed. “I try to imagine what it would have been like maybe two hundred years ago to look into this same valley and see the bison out there as they appear to us now,” Turner said. “Did they have the same feelings welling up inside of them as I do now?”