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

by Todd Wilkinson

  This quiet war against prairie dogs persists at the same time that the US federal government and states are spending hard-earned tax dollars every year trying to rescue species that rely on prairie dog colonies for food and shelter.

  Turner isn’t the only person who likens the earlier eradication campaign “to a form of genocide.” But he is certainly the best known. His conclusion is shared by the leading conservation biologists in the world, who liken the assault on prairie dogs to the strategy of applying biocides like DDT to control insects after World War II without a full understanding of its effects.

  DDT caused staggering declines in non-target animals, including bald eagles (the nation’s symbol), peregrine falcons, and other species. The story of its toll formed the narrative of Rachel Carson’s seminal 1962 book, Silent Spring, that arguably marked the advent of modern environmental awareness. The rapid loss of bald eagles served as a catalyst for getting DDT banned and passing the Endangered Species Act (ESA) into law. Back in the 1970s and ’80s when Turner’s children were in high school, he handed them copies of Silent Spring. “It was the first book that Dad gave to me and said, ‘Read it, it will make you smarter,’” his eldest child, Laura Turner Seydel, says.

  If Mike Gilpin had his druthers, he would see a major span of short and mixed grass prairie revert back to Indians, bison, and prairie dogs, overtaking monoculture and cows. But this vision, of course, is not practical. If the objective is to have a measurable impact on the ground, talk has to move beyond daydreaming to action. And Gilpin’s track record with pondering the fates of imperiled species is extensive. He was among the select team of experts who made the call to pull the last twenty-two remaining California condors out of the wild in 1987, preserving their genetics instead of allowing the birds to fade into certain oblivion, or as conservationist Kenneth Brower said, letting them wink out on their own, “extinction with dignity.”

  Gilpin has watched the pattern repeated time and again: expanding human populations fragment wildlife habitat, leaving species to persist only in remnant shards until they vanish into silence. And he is not hopeful, given current trends in the world, that prairie dog and bison will ever re-attain the full ecological function they had on a grand scale.

  “Unless . . . ,” Gilpin says, stopping mid-thought. “Unless something happens in the market that gives us a radically different orientation to the environment from the one we have.” He points to the work of British ethologist and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, author of the provocative 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, in which Dawkins introduced the concept of meme (pronounced meem). A meme, by his definition, is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.

  Dawkins proposed that species may evolve by passing genetic material, as espoused by Charles Darwin, with such things as environmental factors and competition gradually shaping the form that plants and animals take.

  But another factor affecting survival is that of the meme: In other words, do societies possess traits that predispose them to survival or extinction? The gist is that human collective behaviors have parallels to species’ abilities to perpetuate themselves. Values are passed along like DNA from one generation to the next. Hence, for example, a society that is culturally indoctrinated to pursue land-use practices, that, say, result in chronic environmental degradation, possesses a meme that predisposes them to fail compared to customs that emphasize living well below the threshold of resource depletion. This is also postulated by Gilpin’s friend, Jared Diamond, in his important book, Collapse.

  In the animal kingdom, including humans, Gilpin has noticed across time that species which have customs—or memes—that control their populations, prevent inbreeding that harms their genetics, and avoid risky behaviors such as wars and unhealthy living that might jeopardize their survival, tend to last over time. Another iteration of a meme is a cultural tradition that eradicates species based on a continuously reinforcing value system. Unless something happens that triggers believers to abandon it for another way of thinking about those species, they are doomed to perish.

  Prairie dogs have a meme that involves females practicing infanticide as a form of population control, in addition to other social practices that prevent incest and environmental degradation.

  On a macro, human-behavioral scale, Gilpin sees Turner as a possible meme; a man who is challenging destructive, culturally indoctrinated customs in the West that have resulted in nature being subdued, tamed, diluted, and extirpated. By actions, he is showing that profits can still be derived while being more tolerant and ecologically sensitive, that broad, deep, and enduring value requires much more than a maximally favorable fiscal bottom line. It places him, potentially, at the forefront of a new tradition that emphasizes real eco-sustainability, not some half-baked notion of it.

  This kind of meme, which is expressed by Turner and only a few others, has broad implications. In 2012, Turner sponsored a summit of large private landowners that collectively have dominion over millions of acres. They wanted to know more about how he does what he does.

  “The question is what effect he has on others who are in a position to make a difference. Will they follow? Can Turner’s ethic be adopted by enough people that it starts a shift?” Gilpin asks.

  One way or another, Gilpin says, the human species will discover that it cannot violate the fundamental laws of evolution. Organisms cannot outstrip the resources that sustain them and engage in behaviors focused on individual selfish interests at the expense of the species.

  He, like Turner, heeds the warnings of Paul Ehrlich about the population explosion and the age-old predictions of the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus. Ehrlich wrote the 1968 book, The Population Bomb, that Turner says has influenced where he focuses his energies: on nuclear nonproliferation, protecting biodiversity, addressing climate change by promoting alternative energy, and reversing human population by elevating poor people out of poverty but without accelerating resource consumption.

  There are seven billion humans now, at least nine billion projected by the middle of this century, and at the present rate of resource depletion it will require another Earth and a half to meet the demand for raw materials. Since no other Earth is in sight, it means scaling back human numbers, over time, to between five hundred million and 1.5 billion, two billion at the most, Ehrlich says, a range that members of the political right and commentators on FOX News consider heresy. Turner isn’t proposing heavy-handed eugenic intervention or laws prohibiting breeding, but rather support for women’s rights, access to birth control, and standard of living improvements, including health care, all of which have shown to serve as factors in reducing the number of babies women have. It would be achieved incrementally over generations. The last century showed that countries with high quality of life—not necessarily tied to high levels of resource consumption—have lower birth rates.

  As Ehrlich adds, parents who have two children actually are below the replacement rate. Turner notes that as much as he loves his five children, he would strictly adhere to the two-child rule today. Devil’s advocates have rightly pointed out that he also flies in a private jet, logging millions of miles during his career and contributing exponentially more than a small legion of average Joes ever will to climate change in terms of emissions from their transportation vehicles. These are two huge contradictions to which Turner replies that he has no defense, other than to point out that he is managing his land to serve as sinks for collecting greenhouse gas emissions well in excess of the total emissions of all Turner activities. He is capturing more carbon than he is creating by a ratio of seven to one.

  Turner contends that the risk of being a hypocrite should not prevent one from doing more good than harm. “Whether you’re rich or not, we all need to do our part. I make decisions and if they are harmful, I will correct them or more than make up for them. I ain’t perfect but you don’t need to be perfect to
take positions to make you a better human. You just can’t be a coward.”

  Challenging the status quo is unsettling to those invested in defending it, but it’s myopic to ignore the compelling evidence of science that demands humans change their behavior, former US vice president and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Al Gore, perhaps the world’s best known crusader on climate change, tells me.

  “Owing to his forays into cable television, this isn’t news to Ted. Sometimes, it results in him being on the receiving end of ad hominem attacks. Believe me, I know ad hominem attacks when I see them. For doing what Ted Turner has done, never pursuing things based on whether they are popular but rather whether or not they are right, I love the guy.”

  Gore, like Turner, travels in jet aircraft, in private planes. He drives a car, lives in a house, eats meat, consumes material goods, and has no dreams of being a Neo-Luddite. “People are always going to take potshots no matter what you do,” he says of the “shoot the messenger” syndrome. “If you allow your critics to define you, addle you, then you are destined to do nothing. I know that I can never live a perfect life in the eyes of some others, but that doesn’t stop me from being conscientious and striving to do a little better tomorrow than I did today. Ted is someone who typifies that philosophy.”

  Turner has no business card, but in his wallet he carries around a printed one-sided copy of “Eleven Voluntary Initiatives by Ted Turner”:

  I promise to care for planet earth and all living things thereon, especially my fellow human beings.

  I promise to treat all persons everywhere with dignity, respect, and friendliness.

  I promise to have no more than one or two children.

  I promise to use my best efforts to help save what is left of our natural world in its undisturbed state, and to restore degraded areas.

  I promise to use as little of our non-renewable resources as possible.

  I promise to minimize my use of toxic chemicals, pesticides and other poisons, and to encourage others to do the same.

  I promise to contribute to those less fortunate to help them become self-sufficient and enjoy the benefits of decent life including clean air and water, adequate food, health care, housing, education and individual rights.

  I reject the use of force, in particular military force, and I support United Nations arbitration of international disputes.

  I support the total elimination of all nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, and ultimately the elimination of all weapons of mass destruction.

  I support the United Nations and its efforts to improve the conditions of the planet.

  I support clean renewable energy and a rapid move to eliminate carbon emissions.

  Yes, Turner has been confronted with his contradictions, especially with points 3 and 5. That’s why he consciously tries to use his resources to radically reduce his carbon footprint in other ways, he says. He is managing his ranchlands in ways that keep the plant life and soil healthy in order to maximize natural carbon sequestration; that’s why he buys carbon credits; that’s why he sanctioned an energy audit to identify places in his operation to be more efficient; that’s why he’s invested millions of dollars in alternative energy, and it’s why, among other things, he supports Turner Foundation efforts to help achieve large systemic changes, such as partnering with the National Restaurant Association to change the way the industry does business in more than a million eateries, helping local entrepreneurs achieve savings through energy and water conservation and by scaling the use of best practices geared to sustainable resource use. He’s also promoting a parallel initiative with national hoteliers.

  “In 1938 when I was born, the world had around two billion people. We’ve just sailed through seven billion and we’re headed toward nine or ten billion during this century,” Turner says. “That’s a three and a half time increase of the world population in just my lifespan. That’s insane. Today, two billion of those seven billion people are undernourished and we’re already seeing stressed resources.”

  Turner and Ehrlich agree that small, feel-good measures carried out by individuals add up, but unless such things as recycling, wind and solar power, fuel efficiency in autos and homes, are scaled to incorporate hundreds of millions and billions of citizens, it won’t matter. Game over. Whales were saved only because electricity brought a better way to illuminate the night.

  “We’re going to run out of everything,” Turner says. “The fossil fuel industry says we’ve got enough oil and gas to last one hundred years. A hundred years! That’s no amount of time at all. And where will we be with another two or three billion of us in fifty years, not including the billions in China and India who are taking their cues from how we live? We need to lead.”

  Ehrlich says that relying on the promise of technological fixes to rescue civilization from large-scale environmental problems is folly, particularly when the issue is compounded by the stress of demand for basic resources by a population that continues to rise.

  “Ted is absolutely right to make the connection between all four of his focus areas,” Ehrlich says. “Population affects resource depletion and uses land to grow food, which reduces habitat for native plants and animals. If you throw climate change or a nuclear disaster on top it, we’re flirting with serious trouble. You have to address all four moving parts. But population is the big elephant in the room.”

  If humans do not consciously make an effort to reduce population, nature will find a way to get the reduction done, Gilpin says. Ehrlich praises Turner for trying to keep the discussion about human population and its impact on nature alive, even though it opens him to constant ridicule. As a leading thinker in conservation biology based at Stanford University, Ehrlich points to Turner’s use of bison as a retro tool for bettering biodiversity and integrating it into a supply side model of promoting healthier eating. It’s a radical departure from the prevailing agricultural model of crop monoculture, intensive use of herbicides and pesticides, water use, and pumping livestock full of antibiotics, and it is complementary to sustaining predators at the top of the food chain.

  “I’ve always been an admirer of Ted’s. I like his direct approach. If the objective is protecting biodiversity, he goes out and buys it himself, then protects it, or he makes his land available to bring biodiversity back and he is using native species to make it profitable, without taming bison through heavy-handed animal husbandry,” Ehrlich says.

  “If you want to call that a meme more likely to predispose human survival, and I think you could, it’s a damned good one.”

  Billionaire John Malone, the CEO of Liberty Media, is a close friend of Turner’s, going back to the days when they made cable television a fixture of American life. He says Turner’s green ethics have rubbed off on him. Like Turner, Malone has used his fortune to buy land—a whopping two million–plus acres, with the aspiration of bypassing Turner and being the biggest individual landowner in the country. He accomplished that feat in 2011.

  Based on conversations and lobbying he’s received from Turner, Malone has put a huge swath of his property under conservation easement. “We haven’t made a move to bison yet. We’re running some cattle but we’re doing it in a way that is mindful of the range and the watersheds,” Malone says. “You can’t be around Ted and not be affected by what he’s doing.”

  Malone joined several large landowners at Turner’s Flying D Ranch recently, with the idea of doing for wildlife conservation on private land what the growing fold of magnanimous billionaires are doing for eco-philanthropy. And their efforts won a glowing endorsement from E. O. Wilson.

  As for whether Turner is a potential meme—an agent of change—and whether the TESF is a useful model that others might duplicate for protecting biodiversity, this, too, has attracted influential emulators. Thomas Kaplan refers to Turner as his green role model. “Ted Turner is the one. He is the intellectual and p
ractical leader of this new wave in conservation. I am a follower, albeit a passionate one.”

  A more recent self-made billionaire, Kaplan has launched two private conservation initiatives that he says mirror the objectives and functions of the Turner Endangered Species Fund.

  One is an idea inspired by his daughter’s interest in snakes called Project Orianne. Kaplan has purchased a large property in southern Georgia where, as with Turner’s efforts on St. Phillips Island, staff biologists are reintroducing indigo snakes. Secondly, and based on his own fascination with the ecological role of big cats as apex predators, he has hired some of the leading field biologists in the world to spearhead his effort. Called the Panthera Corporation, it is aimed at protecting lions, tigers, jaguars, cheetahs, leopards, mountain lions, and snow leopards. Heading up the restoration effort (with a focus on field research and on expanding protected areas around the world) is George Schaller and zoologist Alan Rabinowitz.

  “There’s no doubt in my mind that the gauntlet he threw down with his contribution to the UN had an impact. And so, too, with the Turner Endangered Species Fund and his other foundations. He said people who have the good fortune of making money should use their wealth and power to do good during their lifetime. Anything else, he said, was considered a cop-out. His challenge turned heads. I know it did because it caught my attention,” Kaplan says.

  Specifically and poignantly, Turner had the courage to call upon people he considers to be his friends, guys like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, telling them it’s too late to wait until one is dead and leave your intentions up to heirs to carry out. “He said the world has big issues that we must contend with now—issues that might be unsolvable later,” Kaplan explains. “That kind of appeal made a lot of sense to me. And the way he involves his children made me start thinking how I, too, can involve my family.”