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

by Todd Wilkinson

  “Ted gets energized coming out here. He likes seeing how little actions all tie together. And it’s a fascination that he enjoys sharing with his son,” Phillips says.

  The Turner family understands that the extinction crisis will not be redressed in a short period of time. “They are very determined to put their good fortune to good use,” Phillips says. “They’re not poseurs. They’re acutely infected with what E. O. Wilson terms biophilia, an instinctive bond between humans and the natural world.”

  “They know that as human growth continues and resource consumption continues, the footprint of our species isn’t growing smaller and lighter; it’s bigger and heavier. Stewardship isn’t a one-time thing where you write a check and call your work done. Like good governance, the need to be involved doesn’t stop on Friday. You have to be mindful of it every day, forever. Ted has taught them that responsibility begins with your own land.”

  Small as it seems in the context of Turner’s life, “Spots like this give him as much pride as anything else he does,” Phillips continues. “And do you know the reason for it? Because Ted knows that restored nature can persist through the ages.”

  The objective of the Turner Endangered Species Fund is to restore fauna and flora that might have disappeared or been in decline on Turner land when he bought the properties. TESF’s theme is: “conserving biodiversity by ensuring the persistence of imperiled species and their habitats.” Those words are closely knitted with the motto of Turner Enterprises Inc., the for-profit umbrella of Turner’s business holdings, which is “to manage Turner lands in an economically sustainable and ecologically sensitive manner while promoting the conservation of native species.”

  In practice, the taglines forge a bold and defiant declaration that has captured attention from policymakers in Washington, DC, and other larger landholders, and resulted in collaborations with government agencies mandated, by law, to prevent species extinctions.

  For Turner, being an avowed “eco-capitalist” is about having a corporate social consciousness. His intent is to challenge the misguided perception that species preservation comes at the expense of prosperity and human livelihoods. He calls it a false dichotomy. He has heard fellow property owners charge that having endangered species on their land will run them out of business or impinge their liberty. And there is also a widely held view among environmentalists, he says, that unless government steps in and protects species from extinction, many animals will not survive.

  “I am committed to proving them wrong. Species survival should not have to depend on public lands or private lands. An animal should not have to die or live or be considered important depending on whether it’s on the Endangered Species list. That’s wrongheaded. Conservation isn’t a choice between nature and prosperity. It’s a combination of both, put together.

  “Before I spent time out on the prairie, I had no idea that it could be such an interesting place, so alive with animals. It makes you almost want to cry when you are in the middle of it,” he says.

  Yes, to be a prairie dweller, unplugged from gadgetry, is to attain a heightened sentient awareness. He is smitten by the passing southward migration of birds overhead; the cackling of rooster pheasants rising from a dog on point; the sight of bounding deer bucks, darting pronghorn, and bison; the way that angling light paints the prairie in washes of warm, abiding earth tones. Something about it, he says, makes him feel less empty and more connected to the rhythm of life.

  He has a ritual of trying to visit prairie dog colonies now spread across five different properties. He often is able to summon, from memory, the exact number of acres each colony occupied at last count. His compulsive directive to the ranch managers is always the same: “Look out for the prairie dogs.”

  Back at the ranch house, Turner meets with Bad River manager Tom LeFaive.

  A jolly man and a biologist by training, LeFaive asks Turner to speculate on when he might finally declare mission accomplished with prairie dogs. Ranchers in the area who despise the critters have been wondering, he says. They don’t want to be the recipients of Ted’s animals spilling over onto their land—especially animals they’ve spent so much money and heritage trying to annihilate.

  Part of LeFaive’s own job responsibility is to raise healthy bison, and he too worries about having enough grass. It’s been hard for him to warm up to prairie dogs.

  Turner’s face fills with a mawkish grin as he contemplates LeFaive’s question. It’s not tinged with defiance, but conviction. “For now, we keep growing prairie dogs. They have an important place on the prairie, the same as we do.”

  He understands why his neighbors don’t like prairie dogs—they see them as stealers of grass that would go into the mouths of cattle. Turner even has resigned himself to the unpleasant reality that, in order to keep peace and continue his restoration, he needs to honor their request for lethal control. Turner isn’t lacking in empathy but he says the discussion of prairie dogs has been one-sided.

  “You let the neighbors know, Tom, that we’ll do our best to contain prairie dogs inside the border of the ranch. And if they should cross over, and the neighbors don’t like it, then they can go ahead and control them. But God, I hate poison. You needlessly kill a lot of other things you don’t have to kill when you put poison out there. Let them know that we want to work together on this.”

  Turner’s support of rebuilding prairie dog colonies has been characterized by critics as a fetish. His name is openly cursed by some stockmen who have spent generations trying to make prairie dogs vanish. They would be happy to have the landscape completely cleansed of the native animals.

  Within the circle of his own family, “Grandpa Ted’s” prairie dogs have been the subject of his grandchildren’s show and tell days at schools in Atlanta, Tallahassee, Lexington, Kentucky, and Charleston, South Carolina. Turner’s eldest daughter, Laura Turner Seydel, is a board member of Defenders of Wildlife, an organization that, for decades, has been trying to bolster protection for prairie dogs. And Turner’s youngest daughter, Jennie Turner Garlington, has been a trustee with the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, assisting private property owners and government agencies with numerous prairie conservation initiatives.

  Why do prairie dogs matter? Once ubiquitous in the West, their colonies were dispersed from the Mississippi River to southern California, from the high plains of western Canada to northern Mexico. Five different species inhabited between eighty and one hundred million acres. Perhaps five billion prairie dogs existed when Lewis and Clark passed through the West. Lewis estimated the numbers as “infinite.” Today they exist at less than 5 percent of their original numbers and range. Billions of dollars, marshaled in an arsenal of poison baits, traps, bullets, and habitat modification, have been flung at them with lethal effectiveness. Combined with outbreaks of the wildlife equivalent of bubonic plague—called sylvatic plague, introduced to this continent with European colonization—total annihilation of prairie dogs, at one point, was not inconceivable. Many ranchers and farmers would have considered it a victory.

  Ironically, as prairie dog populations have tumbled, the economic prospects of farming and ranching have hardly improved. According to the Worldwatch Institute, a little over a century ago, every $1 that consumers spent on a typical US food item yielded about 40 cents for the farmer or rancher, with the rest split between input and distribution. Today, only 7 cents out of every dollar spent at the checkout aisle goes back to the producer. Seventy-three cents goes into the pockets of those who package and distribute the products.

  The poor state of agrarian economics can hardly be pinned on prairie dogs, though they’ve become a convenient scapegoat. “I think there is room out here to share the land,” Turner says, his persistence motivated by an emerging scientific awakening of the niche prairie dogs fill. “And here’s what we never hear in discussions. If prairie dogs were such a scourge to rangelan
d, then how did thirty-five million bison live side by side with them? Why could bison thrive and cows allegedly can’t?”

  Turner bends the ears to win prairie dog allies among anyone he can corner. Tom Brokaw, the elder dean of the newsroom at NBC, is a proud product of Yankton, South Dakota, down the road. He’s also been a Montana rancher, and a close friend of Turner’s for decades. He has accompanied Turner to numerous prairie dog colonies and, at Turner’s insistence, has become a convert to acknowledging the prairie dog’s value. Brokaw isn’t alone. Talk to a string of Nobel Peace Prize winners—Mikhail Gorbachev, Al Gore, Kofi Annan, or Jimmy Carter—and each has been regaled with tales about the prairie dog frontier.

  Turner says he would gladly give any American president and the US secretaries of Interior and Agriculture a tour. “Ted can tell you anything you ever wanted to know about the prairie dog,” Annan says. “Until I met Ted, I never would have thought that prairie dogs could make for an entertaining dinner conversation. Fortunately, he served us bison to eat and not prairie dogs. But I’m serious when I tell you that what I learned from Ted about the importance of these little animals has stayed with me.”

  Phillips says that what conservation biologists and Turner find compelling is the ecological dividends of prairie dogs from a biodiversity perspective. “The questions often posed are: What is the consequence of losing a species? What is the implication when you put one back?” Phillips asks. “The rationale you hear is that humans can get by with one less animal or plant. Or maybe a couple here and there. And, after that, maybe a few more. Let them go. Let them wink out, they say. What will it matter? And they ask, ‘What value is there to any animal that isn’t actively bought, sold or traded in the marketplace?’”

  He goes on. “It’s true. We don’t eat prairie dogs, but other things do. If you wanted, I suppose you could justify the loss of many species until there are only weeds and commercial crops left. In some parts of the prairie, that’s exactly what has happened.”

  The Great Plains has a reputation for being home to God-fearing people. “Sometimes the folks who would have you believe they are the most devout spiritual people are the ones least receptive to thinking about the extinction crisis,” Phillips says. “I find it ironic, and Ted and I have spoken about it, that they’re willing to turn their backs on their God’s creation. As Michael Soule says, ‘If you love the creator, you have to love the creation. The two are inseparable.’”

  During the height of his land-buying phase, Turner started to recognize the importance of prairie dogs as building blocks for wildlife conservation across the windswept heart of America. He invokes the words of Jacques-Yves Cousteau: “Happiness, for the bee as for the dolphin, is to exist. For Man, it is to know existence and to marvel in it.”

  The consequences of species loss are, in fact, part of a riddle the Turners, Phillips and others have spent decades pondering. Phillips led the field team that in 1986 represented humankind’s first effort to restore a major carnivore (the red wolf) that had been extinct in the wild. Then, in 1995, he was tapped to carry out gray wolf reintroduction in Yellowstone some sixty years after the federal government eradicated lobos.

  In the absence of wolves, elk numbers in Yellowstone had swelled largely unchecked. Wapiti overgrazed aspen and willow, which affected the abundance of beaver—their hydro-engineering critical to creating marshes. The absence of beaver as wetland builders negatively impacted moose and songbirds and wading avians, some preliminary scientific studies suggest. Coyotes also climbed in number, affecting the abundance of a small pronghorn antelope population.

  Mike Finley, president of the Turner Foundation, was there as superintendent of Yellowstone when wolves were brought back. “I would walk through potential aspen groves that were thigh high and nothing more than stunted woody shrubs,” he says. “Over time the wolves reduced the numbers of elk but just as importantly changed their browsing behavior. The elk no longer stayed in one location for extended periods hammering the vegetation. When I revisited in 2009 it was stunning to see twelve- to fourteen-foot aspens and willows. The aspens had escaped the browse line of the elk and were now robust. Where there was once one beaver colony there were now eleven colonies benefitting waterfowl and recharging the aquifer.”

  “Some species reset the deck and alter the natural order of things. Humans do it, and probably so do wolves in many settings,” Phillips adds. “Hunters today complain that Yellowstone is no longer the elk factory it was in the days when ranchers outside the park complained there were way too many of them. With wolves back, there is probably a wider range of species beneficiaries, all kinds of scavengers, birds, and mammals all the way down to insects. Whether it’s better or not comes down to your own perspective, but if you’re not going to have wolves in a symbolic place like Yellowstone, then where? Well, here’s Ted Turner raising his hand and saying, ‘Hey, I know a place. I volunteer.’”

  As a biologist who has specialized in “charismatic megafauna,” Phillips is keenly aware how species at the top of food chains command public attention and priority. They are easy to watch, and what they do on a landscape appears to be obvious. But they ride on the shoulders of other animals operating literally at the grassroots level. Smaller keystone species, like prairie dogs and beaver, not only support other organisms but are also indicators of ecological health.

  “Prairie dogs provide one of the best illustrations of how ecosystems can unravel,” he says. “When people like E. O. Wilson and Jane Goodall and Jeffrey Sachs talk about the world entering the sixth great episode of extinction—the only one I might add, when humans have been present on Earth as a species—they know that some species serve as emblematic triggers. “When they disappear, other species start to vanish. Keystone species are like the foundation of an inverted pyramid. The tippy crown at the bottom holds up the weight of the mass above it.”

  Turner calls prairie dogs “seed corn” for biodiversity.

  All five species of prairie dogs have so declined in number that each has been proposed for protection under the federal Endangered Species Act. There is the white-tailed prairie dog (Cynomys leucurus) that occurs at the highest elevations, generally along the Rocky Mountain Front; Gunnison’s prairie dog (C. gunisoni), that are found in four Southwest states; and Utah prairie dog (C. parvidens) that inhabit the steppes of the Beehive state and are classified as a threatened species. Finally, Mexican prairie dogs (C. mexicanus) are limited to 4 percent of historic range and are critically imperiled south of the US border.

  The most widely distributed, the black-tailed prairie dog (C. Ludovicianus), enjoys sanctuary at Bad River and a couple of other Turner properties. Black-tails historically were found in at least eleven western states. They were recently rejected for receiving protection from the Fish and Wildlife Service. Their status is a matter of huge public controversy.

  Some two hundred years ago, black-tails inhabited at least seventy-four million acres (roughly the size of thirty-five Yellowstones). As late as the nineteenth century, a single community of prairie dogs in the Lone Star State numbered four hundred million strong. In terms of total prairie dog distribution among four different species, black-tails alone are estimated to have numbered five billion around the time that the Declaration of Independence was drafted in Philadelphia.

  Michael Gilpin, one of the world’s foremost authorities on wildlife demography, determined the animals were not really persecuted until the 1930s. He found documentation suggesting that the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt enlisted thousands of Americans hungry for work during the Great Depression to wage a full-blown assault on prairie dogs. They fanned out across the nation’s midsection carrying backpacks loaded with eighty pounds of poison, shoveling it down burrow holes. By the early 1960s, prairie dogs inhabited less than four hundred thousand acres.

  Today, the Fish and Wildlife Service, based on estimates from states determined to
prevent federal protection, says black-tails are found on 2.4 million acres, which means they are seven times more numerous than in the 1960s but still more than 98 percent depleted since the end of the nineteenth century.

  Many observers, including Gilpin and Jonathan Proctor (now an ecologist with Defenders of Wildlife), say the Fish and Wildlife estimate of currently occupied habitat is inflated. It may actually be half of what the agency says it is, if not less.

  Turner passes along a little arithmetic. Biomass, in terms of available energy resources (e.g., food), is what a collective population of a species represents to another. Turner takes the historical estimate of five billion prairie dogs and multiplies it by two pounds (the average weight of a typical adult prairie dog) to arrive at ten billion self-sustaining pounds of biomass feeding a community of other animals. The current estimate of twenty-four million black-tails would yield forty-eight million pounds of biomass.

  Turner wonders aloud about the net effect of reducing prairie dogs to just 2 percent of their historical distribution and its effect on the carrying capacity of the prairie. “It’s obvious, isn’t it?” he asks. “The prairie is starved of prairie dogs.”

  Conservation biologist Gilpin did his own back-of-the-napkin computation. That ten billion pounds of prairie dog biomass was equal to the total biomass of the two hundred million humans alive on the planet in 0 AD.

  Right now, as one reads these words, prairie dogs are being attacked again. State and federal laws allow them to be liberally killed on public and private land. Poisons are used to kill large numbers of prairie dogs, the absence of which impacts predators and scavengers because less sustenance is available for them. Shooting with lead bullets is very popular. Tragically, because lead is highly toxic, shooting prairie dogs equates to indiscriminate killing of non-target animals that consume the carcasses of dead prairie dogs. Turner opposes indiscriminate killing of any kind, and the use of lead ammunition for any reasons is prohibited on his ranches.