Turner had long been ambivalent at best about nuclear power because of concerns over storage of waste. He sought out the opinions of Lester Brown, and from experts at General Electric, which has a nuclear power division.
“Every option has to be on the table, but if we’re going to pursue nuclear power as a real part of the solution, we have to be smart. And if it can be a tool for reducing the nuclear threat, then we will have accomplished something significant,” Turner says. “But we shouldn’t create one monstrous problem by trying to solve another.”
Nuclear power is no magic bullet and certainly it is expensive and messy, but being open-minded about its development as an energy source enables the discussion to move beyond those who say coal is irreplaceable and new nations becoming armed is unavoidable.
The international low-enriched uranium fuel bank concept, promoted by NTI and adopted by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 2010, has promise. More and more nations are seeking peaceful nuclear energy to meet their development needs and are weighing available options to determine what will be the most secure and most economical way to ensure a reliable supply of nuclear fuel in the event of a supply interruption. The fuel bank will make commercial nuclear fuel supplies more secure by offering nations reliable access to a nuclear fuel reserve. If their supply arrangements are disrupted, those countries would have access to a fuel reserve under impartial IAEA control. This would make a country’s voluntary choice to rely on the market more secure. It also makes this facet of the nuclear issue—the desire to find reliable power mechanisms—a tool for building bridges instead of becoming implements of war.
Tensions could be reduced if economic sanctions are lifted in exchange for those countries mothballing their weapons ambitions and agreeing to rigorous inspections while receiving expertise and materials to have state of the art nuclear power facilities. In fact, they could serve as prototypes.
If the technology is mass-produced and offered as an alternative to coal plants, especially in China, nuclear threats, climate, and energy would be attacked at the same time. China is presently opening a new coal-fired power plant at the rate of about one every week.
Amid the bleakness, is there reason for hope? “Robert McNamara in Fog of War talked about luck playing a role in dodging nuclear disaster during the Cuban missile crisis,” Turner says. “We can’t count on luck, but I’ve always believed that in business, as in life, you create your own luck.”
There are two mountains being ascended for Turner; the first is the nuclear escarpment riddled with peril, anxiety, and worry; for this trip, Nunn is the guide and pathfinder. Whenever they escape together to a ranch or plantation, Nunn says that he and Turner come back with a greater appreciation for smaller victories. As a result of the Nunn-Lugar program, for instance, the blending down of old Soviet nukes and warhead materials has produced a peace dividend. More than five hundred tons of uranium and plutonium from former warheads have been converted into fuel for US nuclear power plants, Turner says.
NTI initiatives have markedly reduced nuclear dangers, a fact broadly acknowledged by government and security experts.
“When you calculate that 20 percent of all electricity in the United States comes from nuclear power plants, and 50 percent of the nuclear fuel used in the US comes through this agreement, you have an interesting fact,” Nunn adds. “Today, roughly speaking, one out of every ten light bulbs in America is powered by material that twenty years ago was in Soviet missiles pointed at us and our friends.”
Even after his financial reverses in 2002, Turner was able to give approximately $80 million of the $250 million pledged to the Nuclear Threat Initiative. The gift is one of the largest charitable contributions to reducing nuclear dangers in history.
Turner often considers the words of Albert Einstein: “The discovery of nuclear reactions need not bring about the destruction of mankind any more than the discovery of matches.” He also has a favorite expression that he has applied equally to his careers in business and humanitarian causes: If negotiations fail, change the scenery, and if that doesn’t work, change the chemistry of the people involved. “Look at the nuclear arms talks in Reykjavik,” Turner says. “After years of making little progress, Reagan and Gorbachev went to Iceland and they came within an eyelash of agreeing to eradicate our nuclear arsenals.”
In 2010, President Obama and Russian president Dmitry Medvedev agreed to “reset” relations between the two countries and moved toward a new accord. It will result in each nation slashing its number of warheads by a full one third. And China has expressed an interest in reductions. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called it “an important new milestone.”
Standing at the window of his office in Atlanta, Turner says he has more than his conscience to answer to. “I am more fearful of how my grandkids will judge my actions than I am of having to defend myself before God. We have to answer for their future, and if we don’t intervene to address some of these threats now, we will have failed them.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Ark of the Underdogs
“The mistake we make is when we delude ourselves into believing that we don’t need nature in our lives, and that we can contain or ignore her at will, treat her as an entity separate from us. Our existence depends upon us being better listeners and observers and caretakers. We need to allow her back into our lives.”
—TED TURNER
Swinging open a screen door, releasing the aroma of roasting pheasant from the kitchen behind him, Ted Turner steps out onto a prairie farmhouse porch to soak in a sunset. With a glass of wine in his hand, he leads his guests on a short trek into the backyard. “I’ve got a surprise for y’all,” he says.
Removing a set of binoculars from around his neck, Turner passes them over to his companions, then directs everyone’s attention to a small divot in the South Dakota sod. “Oh missus praaairie dog,” he calls out playfully. “Won’t you come out of your hole and introduce us to your family?”
Mike Phillips grins from the sidelines. Next to him is Turner’s youngest child, Beau, who now is in his forties. “The boss,” Phillips says, “is in his element.”
At Turner ranches in South Dakota, Kansas, and New Mexico, staff and biologists from the Turner Endangered Species Fund have brought prairie dog colonies back to life for Turner’s enjoyment, and, more importantly, as a critically important step in restoring the grasslands of the Great Plains. While it’s true that many agrarians on the high plains curse the native ground squirrels as vermin—they’re considered competitors with grazing livestock—Turner reminds his guests that his fondness for the creatures is shared with one of America’s Founding Fathers.
“How can you disagree with the opinions of a man credited with writing the Declaration of Independence?” he asks rhetorically.
After Thomas Jefferson became president in 1801, he famously dispatched Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on a mission to map the lands acquired from France in the Louisiana Purchase. Mid-journey, Lewis and Clark sent a gift, via canoe, back to Washington, DC. The living postcard—a prairie dog—provided no small amount of amusement for the naturalist chief executive. Jefferson reportedly even aspired to allow a colony to take up residence on the newly christened White House grounds.
Turner sees Jefferson as a forerunning ecologist. In 1797, Jefferson wrote, “For if one link in nature’s chain might be lost, another and another might be lost, till this whole system of things should evanish [sic] by piece-meal.”
“How many prominent business executives know what a keystone species is?” Phillips, director of the Turner Endangered Species Fund, asks. “How many can boast that they are actively involved in restoring two of them—the prairie dog and bison?”
Phillips says that Turner’s fascination with prairie dogs is based on their individual characteristics and their role as crucial underpinnings in a huge food pyr
amid. “In a way, Ted and prairie dogs have much in common,” he says, watching Turner tell his guests how important the gopher-sized rodents are. “To exercise their greatest influence, each must operate on a large scale.”
The next morning, Phillips and resident ranch biologist Kevin Honness arise early for a walk across a broad rippling peneplain of grassland. “This,” Phillips says, “is what many of America’s 310-million-plus citizens would consider to be geographical nowheresville. They don’t think about the prairie outside of Pierre, South Dakota. In fact, most don’t even know it exists. You either drive through it or fly over it. But it’s important and it’s someplace special to Ted.”
Sparse and vacant, the Dakota prairie has been hemorrhaging people, emptying out in a trend that runs counter to the human population growth overwhelming other parts of the world. Turner believes this trend presents an opportunity for nature.
Wading into a swale of knee-high brome, Honness, who operates a scientific research station for TESF on the ranch, warns Phillips to mind the rattlesnakes. Months from now, this outing will be recalled as one of the last joyous memories one man will have of the other. Human longevity will prove short. In this immediate abbreviated span of it, however, Honness and Phillips are trying to catch a glimpse of evolutionary forces that Turner has assigned them to study and then share their findings. In a way, they’re to Turner as Lewis and Clark were to Jefferson.
After a ten-minute walk, they arrive at their destination: a bona fide rodent metropolis that dwarfs the quaint scene viewed the previous night behind Turner’s farmhouse. Hundreds of conical mounds are embedded in the matted surface of Earth, the surrounding grass nipped short by bucked teeth to a level of manicured smoothness. It resembles a golf course putting green, but is less lush. Turner’s neighbors would consider it a “moonscape.” Here, ecological function takes precedence over the ground’s immediate ability to fill a beef cow’s belly with grass.
Scientists call this a glimpse into “rewilding.” As a private citizen, Turner’s prominence in the movement of rewilding—given his two million acres—is unmatched. Indeed, his portfolio has earned him a reputation as a kind of modern-day Noah.
The Turner Endangered Species Fund has focused on recovering more than twenty species on Turner land. “When you’re small,” Phillips says, “you have to try to be mighty.” Over the years, the TESF has leveraged Turner’s investment perhaps fifty fold, adhering to a multiplier effect similar to that of Tim Wirth, Sam Nunn, and Mike Finley at the UN Foundation, Nuclear Threat Initiative, and Turner Foundation.
Phillips cofounded the endangered species initiative along with Ted and Beau Turner. All five of the Turner children sit on its board of directors and each has taken to promoting imperiled species conservation. Phillips was hired away from a job as a senior scientist in Yellowstone where, during the 1990s, he led the historic reintroduction of gray wolves. Prior to that he carried out the historic reintroduction of red wolves to the southeastern United States.
TESF has been a major force in influencing the way conservation is approached in America by building public-private partnerships. And it has attracted attention around the world, in some ways borrowing from NASA’s mantra of “faster, better, cheaper.” The US Fish and Wildlife Service recently called it a “Recovery Champion.” “Recovery Champions are helping listed species get to the point at which they are secure in the wild and no longer need Endangered Species Act protection,” the Fish and Wildlife Service’s national director Dan Ashe said. Most of the laudable collaborations with private landowners only apply to one or two species, but with Turner it extends to an array of species and properties.
Dr. Michael Soule, an eminent figure in conservation biology circles, says that TESF offers a model worthy of emulation by other property owners who want to make a contribution to wildlife preservation but are leery of government red tape. “We’re like ‘The Little Train That Could.’” Turner says. “If you believe you can make something happen, then you’re already halfway there.”
When TESF was first founded, its funding was several fold greater. The collapse in AOL stock value, however, forced a major reevaluation of how resources could be applied. Scrapped were plans to restore California condors to a Turner ranch in New Mexico and wood storks to Avalon Plantation. More important than throwing money at the plight of a species, Phillips says, is having property where animals can have safe, abiding havens. Phillips, the former US civil servant and an active Montana legislator, notes that government agencies can be well intended but they are challenged by bureaucratic regulation that prevents them from being light on their feet. In recent decades, government agencies also have been paralyzed by lawsuits brought by both environmental organizations and resource extraction groups.
Turner’s come a long way from those days at Hope and Avalon Plantations when he set those cougars and bears free.
As Ashe of the Fish and Wildlife Service notes, some of Turner’s ranches figure prominently at the center of a strategy to recover one of the rarest land mammals in the world. The black-footed ferret was once written off as extinct. But by reestablishing prairie dogs at his ranches in South Dakota, New Mexico, and Kansas—animals that ferrets need to survive—Turner is providing four of the ten venues the US Fish and Wildlife Service says it will take to achieve a minimum baseline of biological recovery.
At Turner’s Armendaris Ranch in the Fra Cristobal Mountains of New Mexico, a wildly successful, multi-decade project to restore endangered desert bighorn sheep today accounts for about 40 percent of the sheep in New Mexico and was the principal reason that the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish was able to remove the species from the state list of imperiled species.
At his Ladder Ranch, the wetland habitat and a corresponding captive breeding program account for a significant portion of the recovery numbers for Chiricahua leopard frogs in that part of the Southwest. At the Snowcrest and Flying D ranches in Montana and Vermejo Park and Ladder ranches in New Mexico, Turner is working with states, federal agencies, and the conservation group, Trout Unlimited, to bring back viable populations of native westslope and Rio Grande cutthroat trout and fluvial Arctic grayling. The westslope cutthroat project at the Flying D gave Montana’s state fish more than sixty miles of refugia, helping the state resist calls to have the salmonid protected under the Endangered Species Act. He aims to eventually restore imperiled cutthroat trout to 250 miles of streams and rivers in Montana and New Mexico following decades of destruction. His efforts in this regard are unmatched in the world, earning him highest honors from the American Fisheries Society.
At the historic Avalon Plantation near Tallahassee, Turner has led a novel effort to restore endangered red-cockaded woodpeckers, establishing a pilot program for what other private landowners can do to provide safe harbor to species without fear of being encumbered by regulations. Not only did the Turner organization pioneer a method for reestablishing woodpeckers using nest boxes, but he is complementing it with a massive effort to restore native longleaf pine with a replanting effort now surpassing one million seedlings.
At St. Phillips Island in South Carolina (where Turner in the 1980s was one of the first landowners in the country to place conservation easements on his properties, preventing them from being fragmented by development), he has reintroduced indigo snakes and fox squirrels, and secured beach habitat for imperiled loggerhead sea turtles.
At his Collon Cura ranch in Argentina, he is providing habitat for guanacos, wild cousins of the llama. Through TESF and the Turner Foundation, Turner has also supported private-public efforts to preserve hundreds of other species, from the American elm tree and wild Pacific salmon to Tasmanian devils, European bison, gorillas and chimpanzees in Africa, and cranes in Russia and the two Koreas. He has also provided funds to establish a seed bank for the world’s plants in Norway as a way of creating a genetic reservoir for botanical species eminently threatened by hum
an-caused climate change.
On this warm October morning at Bad River, Honness and Phillips approach a prairie dog colony to the building sound of whispering maracas. A scattering of diamondback rattlesnakes, almost perfectly camouflaged in the dirt and dry grass, rustle into coils and shake their tails. A few vanish down prairie dog holes. “Rattlers come with the territory,” Honness says.
As the men safely verge upon the rodent city center, Phillips notes the gawkers standing on their hind feet. Prairie dog sentries bark from the flanks. “Did you ever get the feeling you’re being watched—and heckled?”
Honness and Phillips stand still, waiting. A ferruginous hawk sails out of nowhere into the scene, and then come the singing horned larks, balancing on buffalo grass and stabbing at grasshoppers. Over the span of a half hour, a burrowing owl spouts from an underground nest, a coyote lopes over a rise, and a badger chugs along like a panzer. A troop of pronghorn graze in the distance.
Lifting their heads, the researchers marvel at a broader site: a huge herd of bison that Bad River manager Tom LeFaive has turned loose on this part of the ranch. The bovines in weeks ahead will mow down grass and use their hoof action to churn up the soil. Since the massive continental glaciers left the prairie, bison and prairie dogs have evolved side by side.
“If you want excitement—and I do mean real predator and prey action, hang around a prairie dog town awhile,” Phillips says. Having studied lobos, brown bears in Alaska, and Australian dingos, Phillips speaks from authority. “Prairie dogs are keystone species for many reasons, not the least of which is that they are important prey for a suite of predators.”
Honness crouches near a burrow, examining a set of human footprints. He’s able to discern that the two Turners, Ted and Beau, already have passed through the colony, beating them there by an hour. It was Turner’s first stop before setting out on a pheasant hunt with his friend and South Dakota native Tom Brokaw.
Last Stand: Ted Turner's Quest to Save a Troubled Planet Page 27