In 1981, months after Turner launched CNN, author Christian Williams penned a rush-to-print biography about Turner titled Lead, Follow, or Get out of the Way: The Story of Ted Turner. Turner then was not yet forty-four years old. The book sheds light on a Turner whose ideas were amorphous, perhaps naïve about how the world worked, and he shoots from the hip in expressing himself. At one point in the book, Williams lets the tape recorder run. The following passage captures Turner’s frame of mind and it presages Turner’s subsequent engagement of world leaders, including a meeting with Cousteau that would qualify as an example of Turner going “guru-to-guru” with big thinkers.
What I’ve got to do now is broaden myself . . . And I’ve got a plan. I’m going to hook up a two-way send-and-receive station here, so I don’t have to run around so much talking to people. Instead of spending half my life on airplanes, I want to put on a wizard’s cap and think. I want to confer with the best and the smartest people there are, and with the send-and-receive station I can do that right here, without burning any fuel. There’ll be a little shack down a dirt path from the house, and I can stroll over there and tune in anybody I want. That’s the great thing about the satellite—it lets people talk to one another directly. Hey, I’ll be like the guru on the mountaintop. It’ll be guru-to-guru communication. But I’m also going to make my own pilgrimage, around the world. There’s so much I don’t know, but I’m going to find it out. I’m going to visit every country that will let me in, in Europe and Asia and Africa, wherever they have a lot of problems. I’m going to meet with the leaders and I’m gonna find out what they’re thinking. Reading only gives you so much, but if you actually go there you can figure it out. Boy, are those foreign kings and presidents going to be surprised to see me. It’ll be interesting as hell for both of us.
One evening after his sons had gone to bed, Turner and Jacques-Yves sat together on the prow of Calypso, listening to the twilight sounds of the jungle and the gurgling river. Fish jumped. Howler monkeys and birds vocalized in the canopy. They could feel the Amazon’s power flowing beneath them.
Cousteau mentioned disturbing trends he and his diving crews had observed over the years since his first documentaries were made. Based upon what he witnessed, he began to extrapolate with deadly accuracy today’s destruction of coral reefs, the expansion of dead zones caused by pollution in the ocean, humans being poisoned by eating fish contaminated with mercury and PCBs, the decimation of high-end bellwether species like sharks, ocean bottoms being destroyed through commercial trawling, the toll of driftnets and bycatch, and the effects of swift-melting of ice caps on ocean levels.
On land, Cousteau foretold the precipitous decline of amphibians, the widespread effects of freshwater shortages and droughts, increased desertification, and the over-pumping of the Ogallala aquifer on the high plains of the United States. The result of accumulating abuse and neglect, Cousteau warned, will be an ever-expanding crisis, the ecological interconnections no less entwined than the international economy and banking system.
As Cousteau rendered his assessment, Turner was left speechless. He had come to the Amazon to be inspired and pumped up. He was conversant about the Global 2000 Report but Cousteau’s authoritative litany jolted him and drove up his pulse rate. Turner said, “Captain, not only am I depressed, but now I’m discouraged.”
For Turner, the implication was, “Why bother?”
Cousteau told Turner to look him in the eye. “Ted, we cannot afford to get discouraged,” he said. “Even if we know the end is coming for certain, which we do not, what can men of good conscience do but keep trying to do the right thing until the very end?”
If an asteroid were streaking on a collision course and Homo sapiens had a few decades to plan ahead, would humanity accept its fate with indifference? The environmental challenge, Cousteau said, is no different.
Turner still returns to that conversation. “I think of those words and I press on,” he says. “Failure cannot be an option here. We’re talking about the survival of the human race and of all the major life forms on the planet.”
Cousteau was effectively handing Turner a challenge to use his influence and place in media to raise awareness about the environment based on his assumption that human society had little time to act. In 1971, Cousteau had calculated that we had a fifty-year window of opportunity. Given the convergence today of human-caused climate change, population, and increasing threats of terrorism in the last few decades, Turner believes we have until the middle of this century to safely take corrective action or risk calamity.
Turner has many quirks. Millions have heard him recite various verses of Thomas Babington Macaulay’s famous 1842 poem, “Horatius at the Bridge.”
Macaulay’s work hails Publius Horatius Cocles, who stood on the Pons Sublicius, a pedestrian span over the Tiber River in what was then the outskirts of ancient Rome.
Against all odds, Horatius held back an Etruscan military invasion launched by King Lars Porsenna. As the Etruscans surged toward them, Horatius’s countrymen dropped their weapons and fled in fear, leaving him alone to fight. The message: that spinelessness and complacency based on self-preservation undermines the persistence of society.
In Macaulay’s tribute, Horatius “reproached [his fellow citizens] one after another for their cowardice, tried to stop them, appealed to them in heaven’s name to stand, declared that it was in vain for them to seek safety in flight whilst leaving the bridge open behind them, there would very soon be more of the enemy in the center of Rome.”
Horatius was regaled as a hero for the ages, though the battle would have been easier, and glory shared by all, if his countrymen had stood their ground. Turner memorized the ballad during his prep school days. He fired up his yachting crews with Macaulay’s words aboard Courageous and Tenacious prior to important races. He summoned it in the presence of TBS colleagues in battling the Big Three networks. And he shared it with Cousteau, who hadn’t realized Turner was such an ardent student of the classics. Cousteau patted Turner on the back. “Ted, sometimes you surprise me. I am impressed.”
Turner admits that it wasn’t until he heard the Captain identify the scope of environmental problems that he began equating Macaulay’s epic with the cause of human survival.
If humans were only logical beings, the future would be bleak indeed, Cousteau said. But Homo sapiens is more than logical. “We are human beings, and we have faith,” he told Turner, paraphrasing what he had written elsewhere, “and therefore we have hope.”
In the humid mist rising off the Amazon, backlit by a flood lamp on the deck, Cousteau appeared in silhouette. Imprinted upon Turner in that glimpse was the outline of a notion, a vague thought that would later morph into Captain Planet and the Planeteers—the first depiction of eco-superheroes.
That Cousteau expressed confidence in Turner left him feeling more validated as a person who wanted to make a contribution to the world. It was as empowering as anything he had known. He’d never had a conversation like this with Ed Turner.
The Turner men expressed themselves with handshakes. But on Calypso, Turner and Cousteau embraced and, for the rest of Cousteau’s life, the Captain gave Turner a warm hug whenever they greeted one another.
“My dad was gone, and Cousteau filled in something that was missing. ‘O Captain, My Captain’ is the tribute by Walt Whitman to a fallen Abraham Lincoln to give us purpose. Cousteau was that person for me. I guess you could say my captain was the original aquaman.”
Turner arrived back in Atlanta with a twin mission. If he were to carry the mantle of Cousteau’s mandate, he was going to be forced into a steep learning curve. He needed to be better read and more learned on issues. He needed to reach more people to make them aware of environmental and humanitarian issues. And, foremost, he knew that he wanted to use his media properties as a stage for education and offering support to green-minded leaders. He
met the renowned natural resource economist Lester Brown, who became a close friend and the man that Turner describes as “the statistician for Planet Earth.”
“I’ve learned more about the environment from reading Les Brown’s State of the World Reports and subsequent books than from any other individual,” Turner says. “Around the world, heads of state and policy makers rely on Les’s analysis of problems. I valued them so much that, for years, I sent copies of his major publications to every member of Congress, presidential cabinet member, and ambassador to the UN from nearly two hundred countries around the world.”
To generate the funds for expanded environmental programming at CNN, Turner founded the Better World Society, an organization that brought together many of the brightest green visionaries of the last half century. He tapped Jacques-Yves and Jean-Michel Cousteau, Brown, and Russ Peterson, former governor of Delaware, to help lead the organization. Joining the board of trustees soon thereafter were former president Carter and Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland of Norway, Rodrigo Carazo of Costa Rica, Dr. MS. Swaminathan of India, Prince Sadrudding Aga Khan of Pakistan who previously served as United Nations high commissioner for refugees, and Julia Henderson, the former secretary-general of International Planned Parenthood.
Creating original content isn’t cheap. Turner’s investment in the Cousteaus generated tens of millions in profit through ad sales. His motivations with the Better World Society weren’t purely altruistic. With the programming he produced, he could air it as much as he liked and sell advertising. He doesn’t make excuses for mixing motivation. “To run a media company you have to make money and it meant selling advertising,” he says. “The fact is we couldn’t have put so much environmental programming on the air, far more than the three major networks were doing by the way, unless we could pay the bills. You accomplish nothing if you have terrific shows but run yourself out of business.”
Because the content called some resource extraction industries on the carpet, he faced threats of advertising boycotts. When confronted with the dilemma of placating advertisers or running the shows, Turner says he almost always sided with the latter, at huge cost to his bottom line. What profit he lost he gained in credibility and respect among world leaders. Moreover, CNN became the network of choice internationally.
“Advertisers wield enormous power,” Turner says. “But I’m proud to say that at CNN and in some of the environmental specials we produced, we exposed issues that the Big Three wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole.”
Keeping the Better World Society required constant fund-raising and ultimately it was sunsetted in the early 1990s after failing to become the engine for environmental programming Turner had envisioned. However, now smarter and better connected with people in power, Turner used all of the knowledge he gleaned to think of how he would better organize a foundation committed to eco-humanitarian causes. Soon thereafter, around the time that Time Warner acquired TBS and he became a billionaire based on the value of the new conglomerate, he started the Turner Foundation. In 1997, following a $1 billion gift to the United Nations, he created the UN Foundation. With a network of chiefs of state, the brightest scientific minds, and businesspeople in his immediate circle of friends, it was Turner going “guru-to-guru” writ large.
In reflection, Turner says it meant a lot to him whenever Cousteau expressed praise. When the Captain died in 1997 at age eighty-seven, Turner paid homage by calling him “the father of the environmental movement,” a reference that newspapers around the world cited.
Jean-Michel Cousteau has pondered the meaning of that citation, and the symbolism of Cousteau the elder passing the torch to a handful of protégées. As Jacques-Yves Cousteau aged, Jean-Michel says, he became increasingly despondent, almost bitter about the direction of the world. Overwhelmed by the magnitude of serious problems, he was frustrated by the recalcitrance of governments to take action on ocean protection. Part of him had given up hope that the oceans could ever be saved.
Jean-Michel says the fathers and mothers of movements are products of their own time and can only carry them so far. They need to be constantly reinvigorated with fresh blood. Plus, it’s hard to be an activist forever. Some people wear out. Jean-Michel says that he and Turner are of one generation and his father of a different era.
Those closest to Turner remember a rendezvous he had with Cousteau. His mentor was in decline. He was tired, disheartened, and felt forgotten. Turner reached out by inviting him to share in the premiere of the motion picture Gettysburg at the National Theatre in Washington, DC. Turner had bankrolled the project, and considered it an achievement of personal importance.
Turner ushered the old oceanographer to his seat and together they watched. On one side of Turner was Cousteau and on the other Turner’s daughter and son-in-law, Laura and Rutherford Seydel, and other members of his family. Nearly an hour into the viewing the reel broke and the film needed to be spliced back together. Lights in the theater came on.
People for several seats around pressed closer to hear the conversation playing out between one of the architects of the green age and one of his prized students. Jacques-Yves had become so distressed by the trend lines he was witnessing that he no longer had any fight left in him. Coral reefs were rapidly perishing, pollution was prolific, and carbon dioxide had begun acidifying water chemistry, the great amniotic fluid of creation. “Ted,” Cousteau said that night, “you worry too much. My advice to you is to not let it get to you. Enjoy the time you have, because it is already too late. We’ve passed the threshold. The beginning of the end has started. Man may, or may not be, part of the plan nature has for the Earth in the future. Life will be reborn, but first the world as we know it now will die.”
Those around Cousteau could not believe what they were hearing. They looked to Turner for his response.
“I thought Ted would be crestfallen,” Turner’s son-in-law, Rutherford Seydel, says.
But Turner remained quiet for a few seconds. Finally, he put his hand down on Cousteau’s, defying his reputation for not being touchy-feely. “Captain, you are a great scientist, you’ve been a friend who was always there for me, but isn’t there a possibility, say, even a 3 to 5 percent chance that you are wrong? It may be a long shot, but that’s what I am going to focus on. I’ll take those odds. You know that I admire you, that I love you, but I can’t accept what you are saying.”
Turner’s family members were touched by the expression of warmth and they waited for the answer.
“I’m sorry, Ted, but I can’t agree,” Cousteau responded.
To those witnessing the exchange, it was almost as if a transference had occurred. “Ted is ever the eternal optimist because the alternative is part of the personal pain he has carried forward all these years,” Seydel says. “If there is an infinitesimal reason to have hope, he will choose to search for it rather than resign himself to the bleak future Captain Cousteau told him was inevitable.”
Says Jean-Michel Cousteau: “My dad told Ted in the beginning to never give up. For Ted, I know that my father represented a role model whom he did not want to let down. And he has managed his life in a way to make certain it never happens. But what I don’t think Ted realizes is that he is doing what my dad did not possess the strength and endurance to do, which is maintain optimism to the end.”
His father became cynical. Turner kept going, even accelerating his work as an environmentalist. “He has fulfilled the challenge my father placed upon him,” Jean-Michel says, “and succeeded in a way my father himself never could . . . Ted started as a follower and he has become a leader of the pack. My dad used to tell me that the American dream isn’t about money. It is about the possibility of exceeding a person’s own expectations of himself.”
Turner remembers Jacques Cousteau only with deference and humility. “He was my first hero and I’m grateful for having known him. The legacy of activism that exists in Jean-M
ichel and all of the Cousteau grandchildren is inspiring.”
Turner wonders how Cousteau would be responding to the debate over climate change. He would not be marveling at the prospect of a new commercial shipping lane opening through Arctic waters. He would be in a wetsuit with camera, accompanying desperate polar bears that literally are having their footing melt away beneath their paws and, as a consequence must swim hundreds of miles further to find seals and walruses—their sustenance—on waning pack ice.
The epic challenge, which he credits Cousteau with recognizing, is making the environmental crisis real and tangible for average people before it is too late.
“When you lose hope, you become a pessimist,” Jean-Michel says. “Instead of believing in brighter possibilities, you accept the things that are wrong and surrender to them. Rather than working to change them, you pray they don’t become worse or impact you personally even as they harm other people. I think that’s why Ted feels drawn to the parable of Horatius.”
Jean-Michel says he and his father would argue in the years before he died. “When he told me he didn’t believe that we could win the battle, I told him that, of all people, it was an unacceptable conclusion coming from him.”
All hope, however, was not lost for Jacques-Yves Cousteau. Jean-Michel shares a conversation that his father had, while on his deathbed, with Jean-Pierre Cousteau, the attending physician (and Jean-Michel’s first cousin). The world’s most famous aquaman looked into the approaching twilight and had a final statement of conviction. He didn’t say, “I don’t want to die, I want to live,” Jean-Michel notes, but rather, “I haven’t finished my work.”
The surviving Cousteau regards Turner as one of the new silver-haired elders.
“Every time that I get depressed I look into the eyes of a child and I think to myself, ‘We can’t let you down.’ Ted has the same set of values with his grandchildren and all young people he meets. That’s why young people like him. He doesn’t sell them short. He is telling them to go out and change the world. There is no time to think about ‘what ifs’ as in ‘What if we do nothing?’ With the limited time we have, we can only be thinking about brave solutions.”
Last Stand: Ted Turner's Quest to Save a Troubled Planet Page 13