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

by Todd Wilkinson

  Phillips is normally a stoic. But in speaking about Honness, his voice cracks. And he says the biologist’s impact lives on, in the insights he gleaned from figuring out how to restore swift fox. The data have been published and are being used to guide conservation efforts elsewhere.

  “These are the ways that people establish legacies,” Phillips says, paraphrasing a maxim that he hears often from Turner. “What you did in the past becomes passé. The things you do that can continue to be applied are how you reach into the future. That’s one kind of legacy, another is family.”

  In the book she wrote with Thane Maynard and Gail Hudson, Hope for Animals and Their World: How Endangered Species Are Being Rescued from the Brink, noted primatologist Jane Goodall places Turner within a category of conservationists that she calls “pathfinders.” They are people who refuse to accept that species are doomed. She cited a recent study produced by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature that concluded at least a quarter of mammal species are headed toward extinction in the near future. “And tragically, for many, there may be little that can be done,” Goodall notes. “There is an old maxim; ‘Where there is life, there is hope.’ For the sake of our children we must not give up, we must continue to fight to save what is left and restore that which is despoiled. We must support those valiant men and women who are out there doing just that.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Bloodlines

  “I am proud to be an American and I love making money, but money alone can’t buy happiness or ensure success or improve your self-esteem. You know what? Generosity can. Given the problems we are facing, we can’t allow people in the top 1 percent to barricade themselves away and not acknowledge that serious human pain and suffering exists on a massive scale in the world. But we can alleviate much of it if we all rally together. Every one of us can be a hero to somebody. All we need to do is step forward.”

  —TED TURNER

  All five Turner children have seen their father cry—he be-comes so maudlin sometimes that he’ll weep during nature documentaries—but never so hard as when he summoned them together for a meeting of the Turner Foundation board of directors and said he had let them down.

  In 2002, as his finances were crashing toward their lowest point, necessitating that the foundation invoke a temporary freeze on charitable giving, he accepted responsibility for what he believed was a colossal failure.

  Turner himself could not have known, at what was the lowest ebb in his life, that the following decade would bring some of his most satisfying achievements; his complete awakening, if you could call it that, involved opening himself up in his personal human relationships. By 2002, the Turner Foundation had left a mark by broadening the diversity of the environmental movement. Turner’s children had reason to be proud; they weren’t mere voyeurs.

  But some of them may have been fraught with uncertainty, intuiting that their father had fallen into a funk, that his plight could potentially domino down to the philanthropic efforts, nullifying the forward progress. They should have known better.

  Led by their father’s rally, the foundation has been involved in some groundbreaking initiatives to unite millions of entrepreneurs involved with the restaurant and hotel industry to realize enormous cost savings by being more fuel efficient in their operations and utilizing fewer resources. Yes, Turner gained a second—or perhaps a third—mighty wind in his sails after that long night at the Flying D. It’s the fulfillment of another desire.

  During the years when he was building CNN and TBS, Turner read the writings of Andrew Carnegie, who warned it was a mistake to leave heirs with vast amounts of money without a sense of obligation to give back to society. He also attended a seminar on philanthropy in Washington, DC. He sat next to a man, a retired executive, who, like Turner, had explored a number of different options and settled on the family foundation model as a way to approach charity. Both men, a generation apart, had heard horror stories about how children with trust funds squandered the resources. The executive, whom Turner doesn’t name, explained to him that a foundation enabled him to get emotionally closer to his children, to share a common interest in doing good. He also knew his relationship with his offspring, impacted by his own emotional distance, could use some mending.

  What Turner heard appealed to him, so he called his children together in a meeting and told them what he had in mind. “I wanted them to realize that even a decent chunk of money can get lost quickly if you’re not careful. This might sound kind of cornball, but I’ve honestly felt good all my life giving money away. It’s a feeling I wanted them to know. And remember, you don’t have to be rich to know the feeling. America is the most charity-minded nation on Earth.”

  Turner’s first experiment with a foundation, the Better World Society, ended in 1991 after a six-year run. It had been a vehicle to help underwrite the cost of expensive environmental programming at TBS and its sister channels. The effort enabled Turner to assemble an impressive board of world leaders who remain good friends to this day. They became his partners in tackling global environmental problems. But the model for the Better World Society required that the organization solicit outside funding, which compromised its effectiveness; fund-raising saps creative energies that would otherwise be applied to addressing problems on the ground.

  Turner realized that to accomplish everything he wanted, he would have to provide much of the financing himself. The Turner Family Foundation was established in 1991. The following year its first executive director, Peter Bahouth, took the reins. Bahouth certainly did not fit the profile of the typical foundation strategist. He had risen through the ranks of Greenpeace, the feisty global environmental organization perhaps known for its sharp elbows and acts of civil disobedience, most notably in battling whaling ships on the high seas as well as protesting at nuclear bomb-making facilities. Laura Turner Seydel, who worked as a Greenpeace staffer fresh out of college, was aware of Bahouth’s respect among grassroots conservationists and lobbied for his hiring to her father, who also elicited the thoughts of Jane Fonda. Both Seydel and Turner admit that Bahouth pushed him out of his comfort zone.

  In 1990, after the Exxon Valdez oil tanker ran aground in Prince William Sound, Alaska, sullying the ocean ecosystem with millions of gallons of crude oil, Bahouth, then executive director of Greenpeace USA, seized the moment. He joined activists in New York City and gave a rousing speech in front of the Exxon building. Then he went to work organizing protests against the felling of old growth forests in the Pacific Northwest and helped organize “Redwood Summer,” a movement that involved tree sit-ins to stop logging companies.

  “Peter kind of had this fearless mystique about him,” Turner Seydel remembers. “He was young, around the same age as me and my siblings, and I took a liking to him. When you are young, direct action is appealing because it’s a way to channel your enthusiasm.”

  Turner and wife Jane Fonda listened as the Turner kids made a case for Bahouth’s hiring. Bahouth’s instincts were driven by idealism. Only eldest son Teddy Turner dissented; he was convinced that many environmentalists are too idealistic and not rooted in the reality of how the business world works. He says his attitudes started to change when he worked for his father in the Moscow office of CNN and witnessed firsthand the dysfunction of Soviet-style communism and the suppression of a market economy. Ultimately, Bahouth was hired.

  With Turner offering to pump tens of millions of dollars into the grant-making capability of his new foundation, word of its launch created an instant sensation in the nonprofit world of grassroots organizations. Bahouth says the five Turner children were determined to light a spark in the environmental movement.

  The Turner Foundation, under Bahouth, took a cloud-seeding approach, gifting tens of millions of dollars to a vast range of conservation groups selected by Fonda, Turner, and his children. Indeed, countless organizations that came into being on
the strength of Turner Foundation funding still exist today.

  “Ted’s kids were clearly kind of cautious around him because they had not been involved much in seeing how he worked in making business decisions that landed him on the covers of magazines and in profiles by 60 Minutes,” Bahouth says. “They didn’t know what standing they had with their dad.”

  Turner made it clear that democracy would rule. Each child had a vote, plus Turner, plus Fonda made seven. Bahouth was merely there to serve as facilitator of discussions about groups seeking money.

  Bahouth said, “I told the kids outside of Ted’s presence, ‘Come on, speak up. This is why your dad wanted you to be a board member and not one of his famous friends. You need to step up. Whatever resides in your heart as far as causes you say deserve support, you need to back it up with evidence showing how that organization can succeed. He expects you to be an advocate for what you believe in. He wants you to persuade him.’”

  Bahouth has a theory: “Ted Turner actually enjoys being in the thick of chaos. The parent in him wants his children to battle because it makes them more adept in advocating for causes, better at group problem solving and in respecting each other’s opinions. The egotistical side of Ted doesn’t mind having circumstances when civility breaks down and he is called to intervene.”Turner has been known for causing commotions in his negotiations over the years, and getting rises out of people by saying provocative things, but Bahouth’s thought is that, more often than not, it’s calculated.

  Mike Finley, the current Turner Foundation president and CEO who succeeded Bahouth and brought the entity to a whole new level, observes, “To me, the mark of a good parent is listening to what your children have to say, hearing them out even when you disagree, even when your experience tells you that the organization should be going in a different direction. As painful as it is to observe, you have to let them make mistakes.”

  Both Bahouth and Finley agree that when it comes to the way the Turner Foundation has done business, going through an intensive screening process in deciding which environmental and humanitarian causes to support, Turner has seldom, if ever, been domineering. “I’ve learned a lot,” Turner himself says. “I have more appreciation for movements that begin at the grassroots level. Very often, change happens when those at the tops of governments and organizations implement at a larger systematic level, but it starts at the bottom.”

  “Shortly after he hired me to run the foundation, Ted made it clear that he wanted it to be a vehicle for doing good environmental work, but just as important to him was that it brought him and his children together,” Bahouth says. “He wanted them to experience the satisfaction that comes with giving money away and the discrimination that is necessary when you do it. Ted knows that philanthropy, when its motivations are misguided, can become a weapon that does more harm than good.”

  The kneejerk assumption every Turner child encounters from others is that, because of their father’s wealth, they are less sincere or committed, or that they have an endless trove of money to appropriate. There have been days, when interacting with others, when they never knew for sure if they were being solicited to assist based on the strength of their ideas or because they were riding coattails.

  “Ted is well aware of the intimidating presence he has,” Finley says. “That’s why he increasingly is taking a step back and playing more of a quiet, supportive role. He is proud of his kids and he wants their work to be recognized.”

  He adds, “I think they now understand why he implemented the austerity measures at home when they were growing up. He wanted them to not feel coddled but understand that sacrifice can lead to more opportunity.”

  Bahouth notes that “an interesting and wonderful” expansion of empowerment occurred in the kids’ demeanors from quarterly meeting to meeting.

  “Ted very quickly learned to like being challenged by his family. It gave him a sense of what each of them was made of,” he says. “Their dad might have been an imposing figure to them in the past but as the strength in them grew he became less so and, as a result, I think they felt a deeper mutual connection. That doesn’t often happen with grown children and parents.”

  This is precisely what Turner had hoped for. The foundation, Fonda says, became a vehicle for Ted to bond with his kids in ways that never happened with his own father.

  Part of the kids’ responsibility in preparing for a vote is intensively researching the environmental issues at hand. Invariably, as they visited sites to better understand a given organization and its issues, they became outraged by some of the callous disregard for wildlife and special places. In their early advocacy, each would compile a litany of problems and resources being destroyed. As Turner listened to it, he thought of how he felt that evening on board the Calypso with Cousteau.

  “Sometimes, the number and magnitude of problems seems so overwhelming,” he says. And when his kids became cynical, he would pipe in and say that maybe their motto should be, ‘There is no hope, the world is doomed, but, then again, we might be wrong.’”

  All of the kids go about grant-making in a different way. Finley says Laura would rather give money to fifty different groups and spread it around as seed stock. Teddy tends to want to give fewer grants and more money to conservative groups and initiatives in the Southeast. Rhett always applies strict fiscal scrutiny and, given his work as a professional photographer and filmmaker, is visually oriented in thinking about problems and solutions. Beau has more faith in people who are willing to apply elbow grease, and has a special affinity for sportsmen and women. And Jennie, from being both a professional journalist and board member on other conservation organizations, has a keen knack for thinking about how investments can be leveraged.

  Teaching his children by example, Turner demonstrated the kind of resolve he had when refusing to pull environmental-oriented programming at CNN and TBS. Once, the Turner Foundation gave $20,000 to an upstart grassroots recycling coalition pushing for beverage makers to ensure all bottles, cans, and plastic containers could be recycled. Atlanta-based Coca-Cola opposed it.

  The Turner kids ran into friends of theirs working for Coke management in Atlanta who chided them for supporting groups that they considered anti–free enterprise. As Turner learned about Coke’s grumbling and heard his kids complain about being socially scorned, he replied, “You go back to Coke and let them know that if a multibillion-dollar company is freaked out by our little $20,000 donation to a group trying to do the right thing and help make their customers’ lives better and with a better planet, then next time our donation to the recycling group is going to be $40,000! And we’re going to keep upping the ante.”

  Today, Coke touts its own recycling efforts as an example of its green chops and environmental responsibility.

  Part of Turner’s somewhat misleading reputation for being a dyed-in-the-wool, far left–leaning environmentalist has to do with the causes supported by the Turner Foundation. When it was launched, the timber wars were flaring in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. The foundation directed monies to groups trying to save old growth forests from clear-cutting. Some of the money supported groups that helped activists stage sit-ins. Other grants went to groups that tilted a skeptical eye toward globalism, believing it would merely expand the power of multinational corporations.

  One of the groups that benefited, the Ruckus Society, championed various forms of civil disobedience. When press accounts pointed out that the Turner Foundation backed such groups, Turner himself came under fire. While some of Ruckus’s goals conflicted with his own notions of civil disobedience, he said he was willing to take the heat and support the decisions of his children, who outvoted him and steered the group funding.

  As the decade went on, Teddy Turner, too, resisted giving money away to what he considered to be more radical environmental elements. Teddy’s ideology aligns with some of the talk show hosts on FOX News.
Still, he told the Atlanta Journal Constitution in 1997 of his father: “In business, he’s always been able to see the whole big picture. What he saw in environmentalism is that the big picture is pretty bleak. We’re all going to kill ourselves eventually. That’s why the ‘Save the Humans’ slogan of the Turner Foundation is absolutely perfect, because if we save ourselves, we save everything else and vice versa. It all works together.”

  The year after Teddy made those comments, in the wake of Turner giving the United Nations $1 billion, the Turner Foundation gave away a total of $25 million, up from $1.7 million in grants its first year.

  “We were able to operate in kind of a quick strike capacity and respond to fast-evolving issues if we needed to,” Bahouth says. “Often, we were the first funder getting into a fight, important sometimes because if the resource extraction companies saw that the Turner Foundation was there from the beginning, it could change the behavior of how they acted toward local groups. More than having the money sometimes, the groups felt empowered to have Ted Turner and his kids standing behind them.”

  Bahouth helped the Turner Foundation establish a scattershot pattern of involvement on issues ranging from pollution to population. A joke that pops up occasionally around the holiday dinner table relates to Turner’s tireless promotion of “population stabilization,” a euphemism for slowing the rate of human reproduction, encouraging people to have smaller families. As the father of five children from two different mothers, and with conventional population control strategies aimed at encouraging family sizes of two children or less, he routinely is asked by his critics which of his three children he would do without?