In response, the website Slate.com praised Turner, and ever since has published an annual list online that it calls the “Slate 60” to celebrate the generosity of plutocrats. Fortune magazine followed with something similar. And in recent years, consumer protection advocate Ralph Nader wrote a novel about how the world is saved from destruction by billionaires rallying together to change society.
Those who know Bill and Melinda Gates, Warren Buffett, and Oprah Winfrey—four mentioned in Nader’s book—say Turner’s challenge represented a catalyst for other tycoons to reflect, and that reflection inspired the Gateses and Buffett to make an unprecedented stake in promoting humanitarian causes, including those championed by the UN Foundation. Subsequently, it also led to the recent billionaires’ pledge, drafted by Gates and Buffett in 2009 and embraced by other plutocrats. The inaugural group included Turner, the Gateses, Buffett, Oprah, Patty Stonesifer, David Rockefeller Jr., Michael Bloomberg, Pete Peterson, Julian Robertson, George Soros, Charles “Chuck” Feeney, Eli and Edythe Broad, and John and Tashia Morgridge. The gesture inspired a writer at Forbes Magazine in 2012 to suggest that no one deserves to be called a billionaire if they behave “Scroogelike” with their money.
Annan says “environmental humanitarianism” is a new category of giving largely invented by Turner. In the past, environmental projects were regarded as secondary or supplemental, but they now figure centrally into private philanthropy strategies. “I have no doubt that it was Ted Turner who set that trend in motion. I know that people he called out did not like to hear it. He said from the podium in New York: ‘You billionaires out there, watch out, because I’m coming after you.’”
Turner was unconcerned that he might be committing a faux pas. He even mentioned the Sultan of Brunei by name, Annan adds. Brunei Darussalam, a former colony of Britain, is a Muslim country on the island of Borneo. The current sultan, Hassanal Bolkiah, owns a royal title that has been handed down through twenty-nine heirs since the fifteenth century. With much of his wealth acquired from oil drilling, Bolkiah has flaunted his opulence in ways that have largely gone out of style. He boasts of owning an auto collection encompassing thousands of vehicles worth billions of dollars. The Guinness Book of World Records documents him as having five hundred Rolls-Royces alone.
A few months after Turner’s challenge was issued, Annan was in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on UN businesses and he chatted with Bolkiah at a lavish social event. “Did you hear about what Ted Turner said?” he asked playfully. “He cited you as a rich man who might be able to do something for the UN and I hope he is right.”
The sultan, Annan notes, smiled, but quickly changed the topic of conversation and made no commitments. Borneo has rich species diversity and low-lying coastal human populations that will be impacted by rising seas through climate change. The sultan’s fortune is derived from producing fossil fuels that exacerbate climate change. The reign of his heirs could be threatened by social unrest linked to severe weather, high water, and shortages in food. Many wealthy people, Annan says, deliberately try to rationally minimize their moral obligation to help, believing naively that they can escape having to confront the consequences of human misery.
“In fact, he [the Sultan of Brunei] didn’t do anything substantive for the UN mission. I’ve been disappointed in him, but others have stepped up. Ted really woke up the world to the possibility and benefits of mega-giving.”
“Ted can be audacious in ways that others cannot ignore . . . That night in New York when he spoke, we heard his words but his actions were expressed loudest. And his actions were not just a token gesture,” Annan explained.
Turner continues to make his contemporaries uneasy. At a speech on the University of Colorado campus in Boulder, he chastised high-tech executive Larry Ellison, the chieftain of Oracle, for not being more generous with his wealth. Instead of pouring his multibillion-dollar fortune into a new five-hundred-foot yacht, upgrading from a massive two-hundred-foot boat, he should have been magnanimous. “He’d be happier if he’d spent that money on other people instead of himself,” Turner said.
Because the UN charter does not allow individual citizens to make direct contributions, Turner decided to create an entity that works in support of the UN mission. With Annan’s blessing, the UN Foundation was created and initially underwritten by ten annual contributions of $100 million. The all-important question was: Who would run it?
A single name rose to the top of candidates, Turner says: Timothy Wirth, the former US senator from Colorado and outgoing undersecretary of state during the Clinton Administration. The brotherly bond between Turner and Wirth is based on mutual affection for the West. Wirth spent twenty years on Capitol Hill as a congressman and senator from Colorado. His work in the House was defined by his grasp of emerging telecommunications issues, including the rise of cable television.
On the Senate side, Wirth was known as a reform-minded political leader heavily involved in formulating budget and environmental policy. Wirth decided not to seek reelection, disillusioned by the corruptive influence of money in politics. Today, he is considered one of the most well-versed and articulate statesmen in the world on the topic of climate change. He considers the recent blitzkrieg of money marshaled by the coal and oil and gas industries aimed at discrediting the science of climate change to be shameful and scandalous.
Turner had gotten to know Wirth when he testified before Wirth’s telecommunications subcommittee in the 1970s. Turner wanted cable operators to be able to compete on an even playing field with the major TV networks. Wirth agreed and over the course of their conversations they discussed their mutual concern for the planet. The lanky legislator was known for being a popular, ardent environmentalist. Turner was deeply impressed with Wirth’s in-depth understanding “that one of the biggest elephants in the room, environmentally, is the issue of global population and unsustainable consumption of finite resources,” Turner says.
Wirth and his wife, Wren Wirth, are close friends with population guru Paul Ehrlich and the late climate scientist Stephen H. Schneider, both distinguished professors at Stanford University who had spent time in the Rockies earlier in their careers.
As a newly elected congressman in 1975, Wirth organized what became known as the “Freshman Revolt,” dislodging several older, deeply entrenched colleagues (including Democrats) from committee chairmanships. And he was known for forging a bipartisan bill with fellow westerner, Republican senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming, to address global population.
During the 1960s, the Wirths say they had been inspired by the words of Robert F. Kennedy, who called for serving one’s country. Then they were rocked by the assassinations of Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. A year younger than Turner, Wirth was at Harvard at the time Turner was enrolled at Brown. After being a White House fellow during the Johnson Administration and then serving in the Nixon Administration, Wirth returned to Colorado with Wren in 1970.
“When we moved back to the West, Wren and I talked about why we were doing this. We decided to write down separately what we believed the most important issues were and then try to address them. We both came back with exactly the same answers. One was the threat of blowing ourselves off the face of the globe and the second was overpopulating ourselves off the face of the globe,” he says. “These two issues have remained the salient thrust of everything we’ve done. At that time, we obviously knew nothing about climate change, but not for long.”
In 1988, Wirth convened the now famous congressional hearing on climate change at which a respected NASA scientist, Dr. James Hansen, testified for the first time that observed climatic changes were occurring outside the range of natural variability—putting a human fingerprint on the problem of global warming. Hansen spoke presciently on what would happen if human civilization didn’t take steps to reduce its carbon emissions. For effect, Wirth opened the windows of the Senate chamber where the hearings were held t
o let in the humidity of a Washington, DC summer. In the years since, Wirth has been involved with nearly every major discussion of climate and he rues how lobbyists for the fossil fuel industry have consistently blockaded any legislative action and tried to undermine the science.
After leaving the Senate, Wirth was a co-chair of the Clinton-Gore campaign, and then joined the Clinton Administration in the newly created post of undersecretary for global affairs in the US State Department. As Turner asked around in the wake of his UN gift, Wirth received recommendations from then secretary of state Madeline Albright, Vice President Al Gore, Holbrooke, and a cast of others from both sides of the political aisle.
Two years after he accepted the offer to be chief executive officer of the UN Foundation, Wirth recruited Charles Curtis to join him. Charlie Curtis had been an undersecretary and then deputy secretary of energy in the Clinton Administration and was revered as a longtime Washington-based energy expert. It’s unclear whether Turner has a better knack for finding extremely competent people or extremely competent people feel drawn to projects initiated by Turner.
One thing is certain: Wirth relates to Turner’s need to clear his mind by perambulating in nature. When then-Congressman Wirth was running for office and eyeing a Senate seat, he and Wren led expeditions into the wilderness of Colorado. Over time, they visited on foot and horseback every major wildland being proposed for federal wilderness designation in the state.
During those trips, Wirth spoke with people in logging and ranching communities, old-guard Latino enclaves dating back to the conquistadors, Indian reservations, burgeoning resort towns, and the urban Front Range from Fort Collins to Colorado Springs and Pueblo. Wirth says the experience not only made him a better listener, but it prepped him for his post with the UN Foundation.
“It’s no coincidence that if you look at the group of individuals who have been involved with every major environmental issue globally over the last few decades, that Ted and Tim [Wirth] have been part of the mix,” Annan says. “They operate from the same roadmap.”
Under Wirth’s command, the UN Foundation has operated with 93 percent of its funds going directly into programs; for every dollar the foundation spends, it leverages another $1.50 from its partners.
Muhammad Yunus, the economist who founded the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, sits on the UN Foundation board. He has been a pioneering force in the micro-lending movement taking hold in the developing world. In 2006, he won a Nobel Peace Prize for his innovative approach to grassroots financing. He has demonstrated that just as trickle-down economics works in some countries, micro-lending can create a “trickle-up” effect, mirrored in some of the investments made by the UN Foundation. He knows how a little can go a long way and how a lot, when everyone pitches in what they can, can literally change the world.
The announcement that Yunus had won the Nobel coincided with Ted’s birthday. The UN Foundation threw a party for both men at the Willard Hotel in Washington. Turner looked out at the audience, which included former president Bill and then US senator Hillary Clinton, Tim and Wren Wirth, capitalist George Soros, and a wide range of Democrats and Republicans, including Carla Hills, who had served as a trade envoy for President George Herbert Walker Bush.
Turner said it was startling “to have assembled so many do-goodersin one room—people whose stated ambition is to do no harm while attempting to help the weak.”
Steve Clemons, director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation and author of the blog The Washington Note, was inspired by the night to write an essay for the Huffington Post. “Yunus and the Grameen Bank are what transformational diplomacy ought to look like—and Soros, Yunus, Turner, Carla Hills, Tim Wirth and others there last night are the world’s real transformational diplomats,” he wrote.
Kijong-dong and Tae Sung Dong would be hamlets of marginal consequence but for the fact that they straddle a narrow green ribbon two and a half miles across at its widest margin, severing a once-united country.
The Korean Peninsula thrusts like a bull’s hoof out of mainland China, a mountainous neck of land lapped on the east by the Sea of Japan and on the west by the Yellow Sea. Notoriously, the demilitarized zone dividing one outpost from the other is both a buffer and line of bifurcation.
The corridor in Korea that forms the DMZ along the 38th parallel is part of hallowed ground. Three generations ago, this peninsula about the size of an overpopulated Italy (South Korea now has 48.5 million residents while North Korea has around 24 million) is where nearly thirty-five thousand Americans and millions of Koreans lost their lives. It was here that the newly formed UN mobilized to halt the spread of Communist forces armed by Russia and China. And today the DMZ remains a potential flashpoint for a modern nuclear war and, paradoxically, a focal point for possible reunification.
And now it’s the site for one of Ted Turner’s more audacious causes: a proposed “peace park” that would simultaneously make a political point as well as create an ecological preserve. A stretch of land that is roughly two miles wide and 155 miles long, and one quarter the area of Yellowstone Park, the DMZ, according to his vision, would ideally be a world heritage site—an ecological preserve—as well as a preserve for peace.
Turner was fourteen years old in 1953 when the Korean armistice was reached and UN peacekeepers were put in action. Half a century later, he passed beneath razor wire strung between Kijong-dong and Tae Sung Dong—the former being a false-fronted “Potemkin” town on the North Korean front; the other a tiny village in South Korea under perpetual protective guard.
Turner knew he was entering an eerie no-man’s land. Driving under North Korean escort with his colleague Mike Finley, they pierced the most militarized border in the world, fortified by land mines, tanks, and hundreds of thousands of troops.
No major human population or army is present inside the DMZ. And since the cease fire was brokered by the UN, a strange miracle has occurred. The zone has become, quite by accident, a quiet oasis for some of the rarest wild creatures in crowded East Asia.
Every day in this corner of the planet where more than a quarter of humanity’s seven billion–plus people reside, wildlife researchers believe at least seventy species of mammals pass through the DMZ’s lush botanic understory that, in turn, harbors twenty-nine hundred different species of plants (encompassing a huge percentage of total plant life found on the entire Korean peninsula).
There are also migratory red-crowned and white-naped cranes, species rooted deep in Asian mythology. These imperiled avians are among 320 different species of birds that nest, breed, and layover in the DMZ. Even greater mystique, however, surrounds rumors of megafauna. Sporadic reports have been made of rare Amur leopards, Asiatic black bears, and Korean tigers.
Organized by the Turner Foundation, Turner and colleagues have met representatives from both Koreas, whom Turner says are proud that inside this front line of potential war dwell animals of concern to the entire world. When he and Finley made their first trip together to Korea, the threat and the opportunity gave Turner goosebumps.
“It is surreal,” Turner says. “The DMZ’s not a zoo nor is it some obscure wilderness at the edge of the world. It’s on the front lines of a potential war. It’s kind of bizarre to stand at the edge of a strip you could practically whistle across and to know there are these rare animals inside, and that, at the drop of a hat, they could all be destroyed over nothing.”
Finley, who oversees the Turner Foundation, earlier built a distinguished career in US civil service. He was the chief steward of Yosemite, Everglades, and Yellowstone National Parks.
Holbrooke lauded the concept of the DMZ’s conversion into a peace park, and believes it has merit. The plan, he says, is “nonconfrontational, asymmetrical, counterintuitive, multilateral, and, I might add, a classic sideways maneuver that you would expect to come from Ted Turner.”
Referring
to the people leading Turner’s foundations—Wirth, Sam Nunn, Charlie Curtis, Joan Rohlfing, and Mike Finley—Holbrooke said that if Turner were a president, he would have four capable cabinet secretaries and a wider cadre of experienced people in politics, business, and media who would want to join in. “If Ted had been president, I would have volunteered to serve in his administration,” Holbrooke said.
Administrations in the White House have come and gone, talks with North Korea have heated up and thawed depending on the direction of pendulum swings, but remaining a steady, familiar American figure on the international scene, is Turner, Wirth says, noting, “Everybody seems to know Ted.”
Although Turner has long since abandoned any thoughts of seeking higher office, others note that, as a private citizen, he is more effective. The peace park concept is not novel to Korea and it’s not an invention of Turner. He gives full credit for its genesis to a few friends, including Mandela, the man who summoned his services. The former president of South Africa and Nobel Peace Prize winner helped hatch the concept first in his home region along with the late Anton Rupert, director of World Wildlife Fund–South Africa, and the late Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands.
Shortly after the new millennium began, Mandela, being physically unable to jumpstart talks in Korea, personally asked Turner [and by extension Wirth and Finley] to take the lead. Mandela is respected in both Koreas. As he stepped away from public life and entered his ninth decade, he had an instinct about Turner’s capabilities. Maretha Slabbert, a Mandela aide who works for the Nelson Mandela Foundation, says, “Mr. Mandela holds Mr. Turner in high regard.”
Last Stand: Ted Turner's Quest to Save a Troubled Planet Page 21