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

by Todd Wilkinson

  Turner says he’s intrigued by the level of informed debate he is hearing from members of his staff. In the past, many such disputes would have resulted in extreme action one way or the other—to the benefit of livestock and the detriment of wildlife, or vice versa.

  “I don’t want an organization of yes-men,” he said. “Sometimes there simply isn’t a definitive answer. If a ranch manager or biologist doesn’t know the answer immediately, that’s okay, but I want them to go look for an answer, and arrive at a conclusion as honestly as they can. And then we need to move forward, not sit on our hands. . . .”

  The dividends of prairie dogs are irrefutable, Truett said. “If we, and by ‘we’ I mean the American people, can embrace restoring large areas with native species like prairie dogs, we will have demonstrated our willingness to forgo yet more blind pursuit of things that have huge downsides for the ecological diversity, benefits and aesthetic appreciation native species provide.” He also acknowledged that by employing bison as a replacement for cattle—a species that evolved with prairie dogs—Turner has offered a third way of thinking about the age-old polemic.

  By design, Turner has positioned his lands to be fulcrums for discussing big ideas. Even when he’s not on the premises, he’s allowing the ranches to serve as backdrops for tantalizing and controversial discussions.

  In mid-2000, a group of leading conservationists gathered at the Ladder Ranch to discuss a topic called “post-Pleistocene rewilding” and to focuses on what would happen if large animals that disappeared from North America thirteen thousand years ago were brought back—Ice Age creatures such as woolly mammoths and mastodons, giant sloths, sabertooth tigers, camels, cheetahs, and an assortment of other creatures.

  “It was all purely conceptual revolving around the concept, ‘what if?’” Phillips says. “It was brainstorming with ecologists whose whole careers have been spent thinking about extinctions and how ecosystems operate, what we’ve lost, and how you put things back together again.”

  Fireworks erupted when an essay was published in Nature written by Josh Donlan from the Department of Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University, and a distinguished list of others. The essay proposed that people think about animals that have vanished and replacing them with rough equivalents, i.e., bringing African cheetahs to the Great Plains in place of vanished American cheetahs, the predators responsible for turning pronghorn antelope into such fleet runners.

  “This ‘Pleistocene rewilding’ would be achieved through a series of carefully managed ecosystem manipulations using closely-related species as proxies for extinct large vertebrates, and would change the underlying premise of conservation biology from managing extinction to actively restoring natural processes,” they wrote.

  The media, however, interpreted it another way. Tinged with snide sensationalism, some reporters implied that Turner was behind a plot to put long-extinct, lethal meat-eating animals back into the West. Calls for interviews flooded in, leaving Turner’s staff in Atlanta struggling to confront the hysteria. Eventually, it blew over, but there was still a lingering impression of Turner as an eccentric mischief maker, even though he never attended the Ladder meeting.

  It turned out to be much ado about nothing. “Hell,” Turner said, bemused, “it sure led to a lively discussion for a while, didn’t it?”

  “On a very basic level, what people don’t understand is that Ted already has engaged in rewilding of a creature that has ancestral roots in the Pleistocene, and that’s the bison,” Phillips says. “If he could, he would have reintroduced another, the California condor. The whole point was that conservation biology has been placed in a reactionary posture where we are always on the verge of writing an obituary for species, seldom are we given a chance to get them out of the emergency room.”

  TESF operates on big physical landscapes and theoretical, sometimes controversial, canvases. The paramount conundrum and one related to the issue of rewilding is this question: Restore to what? What period in time? What ecological condition? What result that can be sustainable and replicable, its results non-fleeting in the twenty-first century?

  How far back does one wish to go—to the end of the nineteenth century? Pre–Lewis and Clark? Before Columbus, European diseases, the arrival of the horse? Or maybe one aspires to recede further in time to say, the end of the Pleistocene Epoch after the major continental glaciers retreated into the north, opening up more places for wildlife to disperse?

  Of course, if one really wanted to be radical, Phillips says, you could think Jurassic and Triassic, isolating the DNA extracted from a fossilized bone or frozen in a piece of amber, and attempt to genetically engineer a dinosaur.

  Ruminating about options is clever and mind-blowing, especially over a couple of glasses of wine, but Phillips says temporal regression isn’t what Turner is after, at least as it pertains to a specific year; rather, the answer for “Restore to what?” lies in determining what land condition and level of ecosystem function is possible.

  Land, after all, isn’t a clean blank canvas; it comes replete with texture, and is the accumulation of all the previous decisions made by humans who have lived on it.

  Turner has the means to pour a lot of money down an Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole. He could isolate himself behind the veiled curtains of various terrestrial Xanadus. He could pretend that the rules of society do not apply to him.

  “Ted isn’t naïve, he certainly isn’t a recluse, and he’s not running away from the obligation he feels toward the larger world. If anything, it’s the opposite,” Phillips says. “He wants to leave things better than he found them. He has done more for humanity with an environmental focus than any other person, living or dead. Is his ego in play? Sure it is.”

  Turner aims to be the first to achieve private-land, conservation milestones that many have said were impossible. “More than that,” Turner says, “I want to do it to inspire, to demonstrate what can be done if you are willing to try. If other landowners feel motivated, then they too can apply whatever knowledge we’ve gathered or lessons learned and make their own contribution.”

  Phillips remembers congratulating Turner at the outset of a novel approach for restoring red-cockaded woodpeckers, a waning denizen of southeastern pine forests. The restoration project, led by biologist Greg Hagan, is now held up as a prototype for private-public collaboration and is substantiating the value of the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s “Safe Harbor” program. Safe Harbor provides incentives for private landowners that welcome or tolerate imperiled species on their land.

  “That’s great, Mike,” Turner said, “but we commonly do things first, before anyone else, whenever it’s possible.”

  Not long ago, Turner was at the Ladder Ranch standing next to manager Steve Dobrott, the former federal quail biologist. Turner held the equivalent of a dinosaur in his hand.

  It was a bolson tortoise (Gopherus flavomarginatus), also known as tortuga grande in Mexico, and mentioned specifically in Josh Donlan’s controversial essay in Nature. It had likely been gone from the United States for millennia. “For all the fears associated with Pleistocene rewilding, here was an example of the real thing, a relict animal that had winked out in the Chihuahuan Desert and Ted was giving it a new home,” Phillips says. “It’s a pretty cool creature, it’s not a threat to anybody, and now it has a new champion. How many times do you have a chance to bring a species back from the edge of oblivion?”

  Resembling the desert tortoise of the Mohave Desert, bolsons were only discovered by science in Mexico in 1959. Relatives of the famed Galapagos tortoise, it is thought that, at most, the number of wild tortoises in Mexico (their last stronghold) is in the thousands.

  In 2006, twenty-six tortoises were brought to the Ladder from a captive breeding facility, the Audubon Appleton-Whittell Research Ranch, in Elgin, Arizona. Within five years, the Fund had perfected husbandry and br
eeding techniques and the captive population included over two hundred animals. Reintroductions to restore wild populations through the species’ prehistoric ranges may soon be under way.

  “To those of us who have worked in biology as a career, you dream of having an opportunity to do something like this just once,” Dobrott says. “Ted is making them happen all the time. I don’t think he really understands the impact he is having and the potential that he has to create a dovetail effect.”

  As Turner hunted quail with Finley, Wirth, and NBC newsman emeritus Tom Brokaw at the Ladder, Dobrott and I peeled away.

  Just beyond our drainage is another draw that contains a bubbling spring, a harbor for imperiled Chiricahua leopard frogs. Further, the tranquil meander of Las Animas Creek has been a venue for bringing back native Rio Grande cutthroat trout.

  West in the Gila National Forest, the famous American conservationist, Aldo Leopold, worked to have the Gila’s spectacular interior protected as the nation’s first wilderness, so that future generations would know and share the aboriginal wonder that would become ever in smaller supply.

  Leopold may also have been motivated by penance. Years before, as a young US Forest Service ranger, he had shot and killed one of the last known wild wolves in New Mexico, a mother lobo with young pups at her side. His own hand, he was forced to reconcile, had been on the trigger of a culturally supported annihilation of a species. Standing over the mortally wounded predator, he watched the green fire of existence fade from her eyes.

  Mexican wolves today are back in the Gila. And a captive breeding facility, sanctioned by the US government, resides at a discreet location on the Ladder as part of a unique private-public partnership.

  Where the boundary of the Ladder Ranch ends, the Elephant Butte Reservoir, a vast artificial lake holding back the Rio Grande River, appears. On the other side of the water, a former cattle operation, the Armendaris, entered into Turner’s portfolio in 1994.

  Unruly, its topography includes an island mountain sub-range, the Fra Cristobals, where the Fund, with special oversight from Turner’s youngest son, Beau, is committed to reestablishing a population of imperiled desert bighorn sheep. Success sometimes requires killing cougars to minimize predation pressure. “This isn’t Disneyland out here. Sometimes you have to make tough calls. You have to decide what you value more,” says Armendaris manager Tom Waddell.

  Skirting the scorching bottom of the desert floor is the four-hundred-year-old pathway, El Camino Real de Terra Adentro. A special subsection of the trail is Jornado del Muerto, or “Journey of the Dead Man.” A sea of mesquite, cacti, and playas during wetter climates, the one-hundred-mile-long corridor, despite its appearance, is actually more alive than it seems.

  “It’s not a desert of death, despite its reputation,” Waddell says. “Ted has proved it to be otherwise.”

  Along Jornado del Muerto, Turner is actively working with the Peregrine Fund and the US Fish and Wildlife Service to recover the endangered aplomado falcon. Nearby, a jumble of ancient volcanic lava also is home to a world-renowned bat cave, a small prairie dog colony, and a small commercial bison herd. All are under Waddell’s vigilant watch.

  To enhance the baseline understanding of the ranch and the Chihuahuan Desert ecosystem, Waddell has chaperoned no fewer than one hundred different scientific research projects dealing with everything from mountain lion predation on bighorn sheep to prairie dog survival and assessing how many different kinds of neotropical birds use the ranch seasonally. It’s become a living laboratory for budding university ecologists to learn from seasoned veterans.

  In New Mexico, Turner is proactively involved in helping to restore species to their native habitat. In Montana, he’s been more aggressive.

  The Flying D has become home to the largest single pack of wolves in the Lower 48 states. More than twenty members strong, it has established its territory in the ranch interior, not far from where Phillips cut wolf tracks long ago.

  “Wolves found their way here,” Val Asher, Turner’s resident wolf biologist, says. “If you’re a wolf, this is probably the closest thing to paradise.”

  Wolves, however, are costing Turner money. Through active monitoring of the animals since 2003, biologists estimate that wolves have killed several dozen bison. In market terms the combined value of those animals is significant, particularly if they were owned by mom and pop ranchers.

  A percentage of those losses is just called the “cost of doing business.” But there is also grumbling from those who operate the lucrative guiding and hunting operation at the Flying D. Despite a cost of $14,000 or more for individual hunters seeking the chance to harvest a trophy bull elk, on average more than thirty hunters a year partake.

  And while there is debate over whether a decrease in the number of large elk bull has occurred since the arrival of wolves, the number of wapiti overall still fits within the desired population parameters of between fourteen hundred and twenty-two hundred elk.

  “A few other ranchers in the West have exhibited tolerance for wolves, but none has demonstrated the patience that Ted has,” Asher says. “He’s been willing to accept losses of commodity animals and allow time to collect more data before any kind of compensatory action is taken.” By compensatory, she means pulling the trigger of a gun.

  Asher is lean, hardy, and prescient. Hired by Turner at Phillips’s recommendation, she cannot stand accused of creating a rose-colored picture of Canis lupus. At her hand dozens of wolves have died. Prior to this job, she worked under a collaborative arrangement between the US Fish and Wildlife Service and a division of the US Department of Agriculture called Wildlife Services.

  Should the day ever arrive when Turner gives the go-ahead to reduce wolf numbers on the Flying D, Asher’s recommendation will be to strategically remove certain pack members. Such a strategy could be carried out with cooperation from the guides and outfitters who stalk elk and it could be based upon science and the standards of fair chase.

  In 2012, three wolves were shot and killed just outside the Flying D by hunters in full compliance with Montana’s big game laws. Turner didn’t rue the losses. He accepted that they were roaming beyond his protection the moment they crossed the ranch’s boundary. Turner’s own son, Beau, an avid sportsman, is in favor of culling the size of the pack.

  Meanwhile, the intelligence being gathered at the Flying D is significant, Asher says. While wolf research being conducted in Yellowstone National Park, at two million acres, represents the largest effort of its kind, the work at the Flying D is novel because the tracking of pack behavior is happening on a piece of private land large enough to contain an entire pack.

  “I don’t see this as an either/or. What if I want to grow bison and wolves?” Turner asks. “How much would I be willing to pay to have a healthy wolf pack on the ranch?”

  He doesn’t have to say it, but his thoughts are drifting to the cougars and bears turned loose at Avalon Plantation a generation ago—to that failed experiment. Here he has a laboratory that has been likened to an American version of the Serengeti and he’s able to do what no one else before him has.

  Yes, he admits, there are advantages to having lots of money, but Turner points out, as he has often, that he has no intention of throwing it away. “I’m making an investment in wolf carrying capacity,” he says. “Wolves had been gone from the ranch for what, a century, after living here for at least ten thousand years? I’m not in a rush to make them leave again.”

  Kevin Honness loved working for Ted Turner, and being challenged by Mike Phillips to leave his own mark in science. He succeeded. His contribution wasn’t earth-shattering, but it was transformative. Together with his wife Kristy Bly-Honness, he and some of Turner’s ranch managers and understudies perfected a technique for humanely live-capturing and transplanting prairie dogs into former rangeland to recolonize.

  A few month
s after Phillips and Honness spent several days together with Ted and Beau Turner in the field visiting swift fox release sites and counting the acreage of prairie dogs, Phillips and Honness strolled along the Bad River.

  Honness said that tracing the water’s path on foot and, better yet, via kayak or canoe during higher water, was akin to cracking open a journal of geological and paleontological history. Routinely, he would find aboriginal arrowheads in the uplands and remains of bison. He felt connected to the current. And, on a couple of occasions, he was able to share his passion for exploring with Turner.

  “Let me know if you find anything interesting,” Turner had told him. “I’m always excited to hear what you turn up.”

  During the early summer, following a winter of heavy prairie snow and spring rain, Honness dropped Phillips an e-mail. He was excited to be floating the Bad River at high water through the riparian forest. It was a wildlife lover’s dream, a true safari experience, he told Phillips. Honness was thrilled to be restoring the swift fox and cataloguing their interaction with prairie dogs, making his own contribution to the understanding of prairie ecology.

  A few weeks later, Honness and a fresh crop of college interns who joined the swift fox and prairie dog projects set out to float the Bad River below the field station. The students were in a canoe and Honness in a one-man kayak. At a bend in the river, things went horribly wrong. Somehow, Honness got swept into a hydraulic created by a fallen tree. He became submerged and drowned.

  He was just forty-five. The Turner organization was stunned by his death. An easterner, it had been his dream to live and work in the West. “He was an impressive young man,” Turner said. “I always enjoyed the conversations I had with him. He did some great work. We had a lot of fun in the field.”