Following his release in 1990 after spending twenty-seven years behind bars for resisting and trying to overturn apartheid in South Africa, Mandela and Mozambique president Joaquim Chissano became intimately involved with establishing transfrontier conservation areas along the common borders of South Africa, Mozambique, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe.
One of the best known, a pet project of Mandela’s, is Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, an area that includes Kruger National Park, considered the Yellowstone of southern Africa. Once upon a time, the Limpopo region was a remote site of lawlessness, ruled by poachers, bandits, and smugglers. Today, it is a destination for nature travelers desiring to see the continent’s iconic species.
After Great Limpopo was forged and the region subsequently designated a UN World Heritage Site, it attracted attention from a group of people who wanted to spread peace parks around the globe, essentially incubating them in tension-filled areas. The Peace Parks Foundation was established in 1997, and among those enlisted by Mandela to help promote it were Turner and his staff, Queen Noor of Jordan, English billionaire Richard Branson, and other prominent individuals and corporations.
Mandela had been impressed by Turner’s idiosyncratic, out-of-his-own-pocket creation of the Goodwill Games. Mandela also was familiar with another endeavor of Turner’s—that of cultivating international environmental journalists in the developing world. Mandela met some of Turner’s protégées—young black reporters from southern African countries who had been invited to Atlanta as part of an annual media fellowship program. Mandela realized Turner’s reach was different from any other media executive. There was also the matter of Turner’s gift to the UN, which caught Mandela’s attention when it was explained to him by his friend Kofi Annan.
In all, there are over 188 environmentally and culturally sensitive areas—set among 112 countries around the world—that reside at the intersection of geopolitical conflict. The most visible regions of opportunity are the two Koreas; the Kashmir region around the Siachen Glacier between Pakistan and India; and the disputed territory between Israel and Palestine. Annan calls peace parks a green glue.
“I’m not a diplomat, but I view the peace park initiative in Korea as a way to move beyond polarization,” Turner says. “If we could prevail in winning permanent peace and one day help the Koreans achieve reconciliation, I think there’ll be hope for solving serious conflicts elsewhere. If we don’t succeed, well . . . I don’t like to think that way.”
Jimmy Carter, who was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for helping to broker a truce between the Israelis, Palestinians, and Egyptians—and who helped free an American prisoner in North Korea—praises Turner’s work at the DMZ. “It’s a good niche for him to be in and he is being advised by very, very bright people,” Carter says. What is most needed, from Carter’s perspective, is finding a path for North Korea to re-enter the international community in a way that offers its leaders and people pride instead of shame. His advice to Turner is the same as Mandela’s: Ignore partisan demagogues who live in the past; persevere; champion a different model of engagement.
Following Turner’s initial foray to North Korea, the neoconservative American pundit Laura Ingraham went on FOX News and pilloried him for even traveling there. She implied during an appearance with Bill O’Reilly that he was a loose cannon treacherously consorting with what George W. Bush had labeled a member of the “Axis of Evil.” One of Ingraham’s books is titled Shut Up & Sing: How Elites from Hollywood, Politics, and the UN are Subverting America. Turner and his cohorts are mentioned as being part of a conspiratorial cabal.
“I think it’s pretty clear that Rupert [Murdoch, owner of FOX News] and his newspeople have their way of thinking about the world and ways that news organizations should be run, and I have mine,” Turner says. “I don’t wish Rupert ill. All of us will be judged on our actions.”
A generation ago, Turner had been similarly criticized by ideological predecessors of Ingraham. Turner courted dialogue and friendship with then–Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at the height of the Cold War when Turner created the Goodwill Games and expanded his media operations into the USSR—the first American newsgathering organization to do so. Further, he once spent a day duck hunting and talking baseball with Cuban dictator Fidel Castro outside Havana while endeavoring to open a CNN bureau on the island. If he were still in command of his former twenty-four-hour news channel, he would want a newsroom, he says, in Pyongyang, Korea, and Tehran, Iran.
“I caught flack from people who said I had no business going to North Korea after President Bush and Vice President Cheney declared the country to be our sworn enemy. The same things were said after I visited with Castro and Gorbachev, too,” Turner says, just days after he flew home across the Pacific.
“We went at the request of Nelson Mandela. I don’t know many people who would turn down a call for help from him. We agreed that if we refocus the way we think about the DMZ, to see the beauty of things inside of it that both sides share in common, it could help defuse tension. Well, it certainly can’t hurt. It’s better than counting the ways each side can blow the other up. Besides, nobody I know, or have ever met, doesn’t care, deep down, about wildlife. Everyone at some point in their life has been a kid, and kids naturally love animals. But more important than helping animals is helping kids.”
The isle of Hispaniola in the northern Caribbean is a landscape of contrasts. It is the place where the Columbian colonization of the New World began at the end of the fifteenth century and now, dividing it, is a line reminiscent in some ways of the Korean DMZ. This point of demarcation isn’t military but, in Turner’s mind, environmental. Turner has sailed its perimeter and flown over it in Bison One dozens of times, studying the landscape from above.
Two countries share Hispaniola. On roughly one-third of the island, Haiti is largely deforested of trees, rife with poverty, and pockmarked with barrenness from natural resource overexploitation. Its larger neighbor, the Dominican Republic, is alive with foliage and has a thriving tourism and agricultural export economy. The average life expectancy in the Dominican Republic is almost seventy-four years and rising; in Haiti it is sixty-one and falling, in part also related to a relatively high prevalence of HIV/AIDS. The average income in the Dominican Republic is around $9,000 annually while in Haiti it is less than $2,500.
Haiti gained its independence when residents of African descent brought there as slaves to serve French overlords rebelled in 1804. On the surface, Wirth notes, one could point toward Haiti and the Dominican Republic as classic contrasts of political theory writ large. The country without environmental regulation has run amok. Four of every five Haitians, among nine million people, persist on less than $2 a day. “What chance do the kids of Haiti really have?” Turner asks.
A vicious cycle has been created between human desperation and environmental destruction. Arguably, this former French colony, upon achieving independence, could have become a Libertarian oasis, one wherein lack of regulation spawned a vision of free-market environmentalism. But political corruption, pillaging of resources, and lack of laws—as well as a tax base to pay for basic services—have resulted in a primitive infrastructure. It’s Libertarianism, absent sensible government, run amok. Large swaths of its subtropical forest have been toppled, causing soil erosion, severe flooding during rainstorms and hurricanes, and desertification. No trees mean poorer soils for growing crops, no shade to keep temperatures down, changes in water cycles, and no wood for construction. It means a loss of biological diversity that brings dividends ranging from insect problems to a marring of the beautiful Haitian landscape. Ecological poverty translates into human poverty.
The Dominican Republic, on the other hand, still has much of its subtropical forest. Its attractiveness has paid dividends as cruise ships have brought a sustainable flow of tourist revenue. It’s true: the United States played a role in propping up dictatorships in Haiti friendl
y to American interests during the Cold War. Still, without a real rule of law, crime rates have been high and recent political instability has served as a disincentive to outside investment. In 2004, UN peacekeepers were dispatched to Haiti to try and restore order over rampant lawlessness and killing.
Wirth had been to Haiti during his tenure in the Clinton State Department and as a member of Congress during the years of the Haitian boat lift, a period when thousands fled the country bound for the Florida Keys, the closest US beachhead 750 miles away.
The UN was making small incremental progress, with the help of former president Clinton, when the 2010 earthquake struck. Within hours after the 7.0 temblor hit the capital, Port-au-Prince, the UN Foundation board, at the urging of Turner and Wirth, pledged $1 million in immediate relief, and it helped hasten other humanitarian contributions that quickly surpassed $100 million. Bison One, Turner’s plane, was used to bring some of the first doctors, medical supplies, and journalists to the island hours after the earthquake.
The truth, Turner and Wirth say, is that Haitian civilization, after centuries of exploitation, needs to be reconstructed, not solely with bricks and mortar, but reforestation, sustainable farming, energy sources, and engagement, not abandonment, from the rest of the world.
“Unless we address economic sustainability within an ecological context, as we were encouraged to do in the Brundtland Report, Haiti is a sign of more things to come, and not as an exception,” Turner says.
Lester Brown believes he is right. “One of the things I think about is where our global civilization is today,” Brown says. “What might undermine it?”
As Brown was working to update his masterpiece, the book Plan B: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble, he started to more closely examine the concept of failed states, with Haiti being a classic example of dysfunction, a breakdown of society, lawlessness, and environmental devastation, but there are many more in Africa and Asia.
“We’ve got a phenomenon under way now that is of concern to me. Ten years ago, thinking about how climate change could exacerbate environmental degradation which could accelerate the number of failed states wasn’t part of our vocabulary. And now it is something that is common,” he says. “How many failed and failing states do you have before you have a failed civilization? I don’t know the answer, but it’s a question we should be asking. We could reach a point of no return, just as with global warming, and because of it.”
Wirth resents the assertion that the international body is “enabling” poverty, which is to say, paternally throwing good money at problems with no capacity to actually fix them. UN critics have characterized it as a “handout” entity that strong-arms donor countries into making billions of people dependent on their benevolence.
Scratch beneath the veneer of those arguments, however, and Wirth says that a sizeable number of businesspeople around the world, who have partnered with UN efforts, realize the fallacy of such thinking. Turner and Wirth both point to Rotary International, the venerable umbrella for local business club chapters that has marshaled a strategy to eradicate polio from the face of the Earth, sponsor water development projects, elevated the profile of micro-lending programs, and devised a platform for mentoring young business leaders.
Wirth says Turner appreciates the conundrum the UN faces on a daily basis. On the one hand, it is assigned to help bring order to chaotic, dysfunctional, and dangerous nation-states sometimes ruled by armed thugs and dictators. On the other hand, it has no real authority to address issues that are the host government’s responsibility, since UN peacekeeping and humanitarian endeavors are neither mercenary nor licensed to serve vigilante roles. And, on top of it, the main members of the Security Council have veto authority when it comes to interventions and what form those interventions take. That’s not the UN’s fault, Wirth says; it’s the rules that have been handed to it and those rules need to be changed.
Often as a result of its archaic governance, the UN has had to sit by while witnessing unspeakable human rights abuses, as in Rwanda, the Congo, Darfur, and Cambodia. It’s easy to be a cynic, and Wirth asks what country would willingly want to be tasked with the UN’s duties. Week after week, responding to the worst kind of natural and human-caused disasters, trying to coordinate delivery of food, water, shelter, and medicines, working with nongovernmental charities to keep orphaned youngsters out of harm’s way and exploitation, and being the first on the ground in the aftermath of earthquakes and tsunamis.
Even for the most callous American who would prefer that the United States revert to an isolationist policy, he says the UN’s role, from a rational economic perspective, is inestimable. “Ted has the gift and the curse of being able to anticipate what the future will look like. There is a dark side to humanity when we get stressed and things get tough,” says Australian paleontologist Tim Flannery. Flannery is a well-known activist in calling upon global leaders to address climate change.
“The lesson of history that he understands is that when resources are scarce, we turn on our fellow human beings. That’s my greatest fear with climate change. What’s required to combat it is that we adopt a common spirit now. If we leave it until it’s too late and stresses become too large, it will make it ever more difficult to maintain law and order.”
The American dream is not originally American, Turner says; it’s a universal desire for all parents to ensure a better life for their children. Parents will go wherever opportunity presents itself. Ironically, America herself was created by a confluence of native people and refugees.
The desire to survive creates unstoppable forces that cannot be contained by barbwire or guards posted along a border. Neither Turner nor Wirth is opposed to strengthening security along the US border with Mexico, but until the root causes of the movement of people is addressed, it will remain a turbulent, unsolvable issue.
“You cannot halt a tide of refugees, any more than you can stop a rising tide of water. Environmental conditions, poverty, and oppressions put people on the move,” Wirth says. “There is a moral imperative that is embedded in our consciousness. Ted recognizes this.”
For Annan’s final speech as secretary-general, he selected the Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Missouri, as the venue. He wanted to point out how the future was circling back into the eddies of history.
Annan intoned, “As President Truman said, ‘the responsibility of the great states is to serve and not dominate the peoples of the world.’ He showed what can be achieved when the US assumes that responsibility. And still today, none of our global institutions can accomplish much when the US remains aloof. But when it is fully engaged, the sky’s the limit.”
Then he issued what Annan calls a “Turneresque warning” to those who believe the United States has cocooned itself in a posture of unilateralism:
“My friends, our challenge today is not to save Western civilization—or Eastern, for that matter. All civilization is at stake, and we can save it only if all peoples join together in the task. You Americans did so much, in the last century, to build an effective multilateral system, with the United Nations at its heart. Do you need it less today, and does it need you less, than sixty years ago? Surely not. More than ever today, Americans, like the rest of humanity, need a functioning global system through which the world’s peoples can face global challenges together.”
In 2010, UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon approached Turner with another task. He asked him to serve on the UN Millennium Development Goal Advocates along with Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs, Muhammad Yunus, and others. The primary goal is to cut in half the number of people whose income is less than $1 a day, fating them to lives of extreme poverty. Other priorities are ensuring that children everywhere receive education into their teenage years and improving literacy, particularly in women who suffer from a number of gender inequities.
Turner has be
come an especially outspoken crusader in the cause of women’s rights. According to statistics assembled by the UN and other organizations, one out of three women around the world has been beaten or suffered some kind of abuse in her lifetime. Women aged fifteen to forty-four are more at risk of dying from rape and domestic violence than from cancer, vehicle accidents, war, and malaria. Half of the women in the world don’t have the same rights as men. Turner intends to put a stop to that.
“If we had more women in positions of power, the world would be more peaceful, it would be more loving and caring, and it would be more beautiful,” Turner says. Other goals are to reduce infant mortality and improve health care for mothers, reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS and malaria, give more people access to safe drinking water, and promote conditions where sustainable market economies can prosper. Why was Turner one of only a few businesspeople chosen by Secretary-General Ban? Because the UN Foundation was already working on these priorities and engaging with others to achieve them.
Here are just a few examples: The UN Foundation has awarded 533 grants totaling more than $170 million to promote empowerment of girls and women around the world. “The board very early on realized that if we don’t invest in women, we weren’t going to eliminate poverty,” says UN Foundation CEO Kathy Calvin. “What we’re seeing is when you give a girl a chance to stay in school, it delays marriage and it delays childbirth. When you invest in a woman, that money stays in her family; it goes into the community. It educates her children. And we begin to change the world. We’re not about charity. We’re about change.”
The UN Foundation also has targeted $50 million at treating and reducing the incidence of HIV/AIDS. It has distributed more than six million insecticide-treated bed nets to prevent malaria through its award-winning Nothing But Nets program, contributing to a 50 percent decrease in malaria cases since 2000. This has changed the life expectancies and trajectories of millions of families. The foundation has delivered $200 million in conjunction with partners like Rotary International and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, in the cause of polio eradication. It has helped cut the number of measles cases by 78 percent. With the UN Foundation’s help, more than one billion children have been immunized against diseases that would otherwise be fatal or debilitating. It has also spearheaded an alliance that aims to make available one hundred million energy-efficient and clean-burning cook stoves as an alternative to wood stoves and campfires that have caused millions to die from lung ailments and hastened deforestation. To combat climate change, foundation efforts have funneled $75 million into clean energy initiatives throughout the world.
Last Stand: Ted Turner's Quest to Save a Troubled Planet Page 22