He responds that as recompense—“No father would give up one of his children,” he says—he is pouring as much money as he can to organizations seeking to lessen the ecological footprint of society.
Reflecting on the impact that Cousteau had on his own sons, Turner searched for a way to inspire kids. While the Turner Foundation was still in its nascency, Turner and his two women lieutenants at TBS and CNN, Barbara Pyle and Pat Mitchell, were working with filmmakers to make environmental documentaries. From that springboard, Turner funded the novel animated cartoon series, Captain Planet, implemented by Pyle. It created a sensation.
The genesis for Captain Planet grew out of conversations Turner had with Lester Brown, as well as the realization that with the aging of such seminal figures as Jacques Cousteau, Jane Goodall, and other eco-heroes, there was an urgent need to reach young people. Turner owned the Hanna Barbera children’s cartoon library and noted there wasn’t much of a green message in Yogi Bear, The Flintstones, and Scooby-Doo.
“Lester told Ted we need to make the time to train and inspire the next generation of students. You can’t be asked to solve problems unless you know what they are and have had time to think about them,” Pyle explains. “With Ted, you could see the light come on . . . what Lester said really got his mind turning.”
Contrary to rumors, Turner says he never thought of himself as being the prototype for the green-skinned spirit created when five Planeteers put their rings together.
Each week on Saturday morning, they battled and foiled polluters, poachers, and other villain despoilers of the natural world. “I don’t see Planeteers as a group of politically correct wimps or as saboteurs,” Turner says. “They’re eco-warriors holding the bad guys to account. The Planeteers make it cool to be green.”
Pyle’s vital role in the 113 Captain Planet episodes that extended over six seasons, Turner says, was as “birth mother” who refined the story lines and moved them through production with animators and the actors enlisted to provide the character voices. She and Nick Boxer came up with scripts and ran them by Turner.
Says Pyle, “We predicted so much stuff, so many real disasters before they happened. We based one episode on an oil spill around Big Sur where Ted has a house and lo and behold it aired preceding the Exxon Valdez disaster. As some in the company wondered whether this was a good investment, Ted defended it. When people in the company expressed concern that it might be a waste of time and cost too much money, Ted said, ‘Let’s give it chance.’”
Captain Planet left its mark on what Pyle calls “the millennial generation”—those kids who were passing through childhood and adolescence at the turn of the century. She receives correspondence every week from young adults who said they were influenced by the series and now want their kids to view it.
Captain Planet and the Planeteers also left Rush Limbaugh apoplectic. And the fact that Limbaugh was so worked up that he felt compelled to sound off about the eco-cartoon characters on his syndicated radio program was enough to make Turner want to continually air it. That Limbaugh was ranting about Turner’s fictional kids attempting to save the Earth from polluters meant free publicity.
That it was reaching millions of real kids each week was great; that it has hundreds of thousands of fans on Facebook today—among kids who grew up and became ardent environmentalists—even better.
“This,” Turner says, “is the best reward of all. Limbaugh and people like Glenn Beck today might not appreciate what a clean and healthy environment means, but the kids understand. And they represent the future of the world. Plus, they’re going to outlive Limbaugh and Beck.”
Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged lampooned the notion that people of fortune should feel any sense of altruistic duty to help save humanity. Consumer advocate turned presidential candidate and novelist Ralph Nader, conversely, proposes that the only way doom can be averted is if the wealthiest of plutocrats channel their resources. In his recent eco-thriller novel, Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us—which won critical praise from Lewis Lapham, business guru Tom Peters, and actor Warren Beatty—one of Nader’s do-gooder protagonists is Turner himself. Nader venerates Turner as a catalyst because of his real-life deeds, but part of his plot was inspired by having been a fan of Captain Planet.
As the third person narrator, Nader writes, “It was no surprise to anyone that Ted Turner, the ‘Mouth of the South,’ was the first to speak. ‘The world is going to hell in a poverty handbasket,’ he declared.”
Today, an energetic outfit called the Captain Planet Foundation, wholly separate from the Turner Foundation, is dedicated to funding high-quality, hands-on environmental education programs that bring nature into classrooms and youth into nature. Over the past two decades, foundation programs have reached more than eight hundred thousand students worldwide. The organization has leveraged millions of dollars to fund experiential learning across a gamut of focus areas: watershed education and water quality monitoring; wetlands, riverbank, and native flora restoration; air quality and climate change study; creating pollinator gardens; recycling; how to compost organic waste; and others.
“Our main focus isn’t just on textbook learning. It’s experiential; it’s applying the ideas students learn in school to hands-on application to the world they inhabit,” Turner Seydel says. Where does food come from? The kids come away with a healthy respect for how it is grown, she notes. Where does water come from and why is it important to not pollute? Students make trips to local rivers and sewage treatment plants. How important is it to recycle? It becomes clearer when they visit a landfill. “We’re talking about environmental literacy, understanding how different aspects of their lives are intermeshed. It’s important for kids to know that, as citizens, they have enormous power in creating the kind of world they want, which is the underlying message of Captain Planet and the Planeteers,” Turner Seydel adds. “There’s a lot of negativity out there. We don’t want young people to be filled with cynicism. We’re trying to ignite inspiration.”
Barbara Pyle, who brought the cartoon series to life, is working with Turner Seydel, her siblings, and Captain Planet Foundation executive director Leesa Carter, a nationally recognized nonprofit leader and environmental educator, to resurrect the profile of eco-warriors for a new generation. Captain Planet, as an icon, still maintains a nostalgic fan base of more than 550,000 Planeteers spread around the globe and interconnected through a page on Facebook.
The cartoon series has been translated into twenty-three languages and has aired on TV in over one hundred countries. “You’d be surprised where you find the Planeteer faithful. They’re in Africa, Asia, equatorial South America, and in the Far North,” Turner Seydel says. “Dad had a sense of how Captain Planet would catch on twenty-five years ago. He always said that it just needed some time.”
“When I go back and watch those old episodes, two things strike me,” Ted says. “First, they’re even more fun today than when they first ran. And secondly, they’re more timely and relevant. We’re dealing with the same issues, the same clashes between heroes and villains and the only thing that’s different is that with climate change breathing down our necks, the stakes are higher.”
The Bahouth era of the Turner Foundation, combined with the crisis created by the collapse in AOL stock value, gave way to a need for dramatic change in direction. It’s been ushered forth by former civil servant Mike Finley.
During his three and a half decade career wearing a National Park Service ranger uniform, Finley met every US president going back to Richard Milhous Nixon. He would go on to testify before Congress on a number of high-profile natural resource controversies. He ascended through the ranks of America’s most trusted government agency and attained three of the most prestigious management posts, becoming superintendent of Everglades, Yosemite, and Yellowstone national parks.
Finley, many said, was on the fast track to one day being named Park
Service director. But tripping him up was one obstacle he could not overcome—his outspokenness and fidelity to uphold the environmental laws of the land when politicians would have preferred he bend them.
People who work for Turner tend to reflect his own values. The legacy of the National Park Service going back to the era of Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, and Stephen Mather, Finley says, is about standing up to special interests that either wanted to destroy or exploit the country’s natural resources, parks, and public lands.
For a while early in his rangering, Finley was a dutiful foot soldier. But by the 1980s, he was tired of watching parks suffer from political kowtowing. In 1986, during the Reagan Administration, he was put in charge of looking after the Everglades, celebrated as “the river of grass.” Long before he arrived in Florida, Finley had been told the ecosystem was in trouble due to attempts to drain and divert water on behalf of developers and the powerful sugar cane industry that was polluting the Everglades.
In fifty years, the number of wading birds had plunged from 2.5 million to just 250,000. More than a dozen animals and plants were classified as endangered, and the mystical Florida panther was barely clinging to survival. As the Everglades were drained, some fourteen hundred miles of canals were dug, transforming a vital wetland system into a Florida version of the concrete-bottomed Los Angeles River. It was the largest public works project funded by the US government outside of the Panama Canal.
Finley raised hackles and turned heads while he was in the Everglades. One prominent Florida environmentalist said Finley, in part due to his willingness to take on sugar cane growers, was the best superintendent in the history of Everglades National Park. Reflecting back to those years in the 1990s, he says, “That same argument has been used over and over again. ‘If you protect a place, it’s gonna put people out of work.’ Almost without exception, the opposite proves to be true. When you protect nature, people want to live near healthy ecosystems and get out into the middle of it because it makes them feel better about being alive. Conservation doesn’t destroy prosperity, it creates it.”
Apart from the obvious positive monetary metrics such as revenue generated through ecotourism, he says it’s the subtle elements of “ecosystem services” that serve as the underpinning. “What you don’t see or appreciate is the natural resource systems that are protected and result in further economic benefit,” he explained to me. “These species such as blue crab, spiny lobster, and shrimp are often born and raised in the protection of the park, but leave and are harvested by private parties in accordance with state law. The existence of the park literally provides food for human consumption and income for fishermen and crabbers. They are nature’s gifts to society, only possible through a well-managed and protected ecosystem.”
Just months later, Park Service director Jim Ridenour transferred Finley to yet another hotbed of controversy, Yosemite in Northern California. Far away in the Sierras, he was assigned to sort out a long festering dispute over the future of seven-mile-long Yosemite Valley that had become clogged with traffic congestion and foul air. “I told a reporter with the L.A. Times that the sound of passing buses was louder at my house in Yosemite Valley than the urban noise I heard in Miami,” he says.
Ultimately, politics stymied much of his work in Yosemite, but his efforts at restoring the Merced River and reducing the footprint of development earned him the number one posting in the service, the superintendent post of Yellowstone. “All of this was my preparation for going to work for Ted,” he says.
In America’s first national park, Finley was thrown to the wolves. Literally. He and his wife, Lillie, started unpacking their bags at Mammoth Hot Springs in November 1994 and within a few months, fourteen wolves were being released in the park, the first step in a now famous predator restoration project that made conservation history.
Besides the controversial release of wolves, another politically charged row was brewing. A Canadian mining company wanted to build an open pit gold mine on the back doorstep of the park within a stream system that drained into park waterways and upper reaches of the Yellowstone River system. Some colleagues told Finley not to mess with it, but he spoke out against the mine and ultimately, with the backing of President Bill Clinton, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, and conservation organizations, they got it stopped.
Even as these debates raged, Finley got a call from Turner who asked if he and Jane Fonda could come up to the park and see the wolves.
“Ted had been reading about them in the newspaper and supported the reintroduction. He was hoping they could take a look at them,” Finley says of the visit in summer 1995. “I was somewhat familiar with him, certainly with Jane’s film work, and told them to come on up.”
The couple was escorted out into the Lamar Valley where lobos were being held prior to release. Turner and Fonda fed them in their acclimation pens and then returned to have dinner themselves at Finley’s house. Turner and Fonda were impressed by Finley’s steely nerve with the mine debate and, as Turner says, his passion and fluency on global topics.
Within a few months, Phillips left his park job to work for Turner. Turner and Fonda stayed in touch with Finley. Finally, after Bahouth left the Turner Foundation, Finley got a call on Christmas Eve 2000. It was Turner offering him a job for the fourth time.
The Turner Foundation was in a period of transition and in need of a strong rudder. Turner and Fonda were splitting up, the Turner kids were older, and their collective grasp of grant-making had matured.
Finley finally said yes, and he now heads one of the most effective eco-charities in the world. His estimate is that over thirty-five hundred groups have, to date, received nearly $360 million in Turner Foundation grants, not including some special ad hoc projects. “Ted has really tried to be a silent partner,” Finley says. “And even in communities where there might be hostility to him because of some of the things he has said over the years, he will say, ‘That’s okay, we can still give that community money. People don’t have to like me. That’s not a requirement. If our funding can help get a project done that wouldn’t otherwise, then maybe people there will want to do more.’”
Finley has magnified the Foundation’s reach even more by working closely with Tim Wirth at the UN Foundation. During the AOL Time Warner stock free fall, both men recognized the huge benefits of attacking problems by building campaigns around issues and developing nontraditional partnerships.
“When I first arrived at the Turner Foundation our budget was approximately $50 million a year. After the AOL Time Warner loss, we reduced our budget by over 75 percent. It resulted in not only a smaller staff but it meant a different strategy for maximizing the effectiveness of our funding,” Finley says.The foundation went from an open process where groups submit proposals to an “invitation only” business model where the foundation reaches out to appropriate nonprofits demonstrating innovation. “Ironically, we are now a leaner, more agile, and focused foundation.”
An organization that bears Finley’s signature and Ted and Beau Turner’s blessing, for instance, is the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership (www.trcp.org) founded to empower the original American conservationists—hunters and anglers. It was launched with pivotal leadership provided by the late and legendary Jim Range, who served as key advisor to former US senator and majority leader Howard Baker of Tennessee. Range was an ardent Republican and indefatigable hook and bullet conservationist.
TRCP, as it is called, reflects the Turner organization’s affinity for Theodore Roosevelt, and it champions protection of habitat while striving to get more kids out in the field to experience hunting and fishing. “Our research had shown that there were approximately forty million Americans who hunt and fish. Most of these outdoor enthusiasts do not belong to the typical national organizations that the Turner Foundation funds such as Defenders of Wildlife or the National Wildlife Federation,” Finley explains.
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sp; “These are good groups, but they did not resonate with the more conservative hunting and fishing crowd. Our goal was to give a political voice to the millions of people who love the outdoors, who see the benefits of clean water and clean air and want to protect the lands and waterways of this country.”
TRCP seeks to unite people who love the great outdoors rather than being pettily divided by interests applying an ideological litmus test, says Whit Fosburgh, president and CEO of TRCP. “Ted, just as Jim Range did, cherishes the strength and value of pulling people together around their common values rather than trying to deliberately fragment them along the lines of their differences. The hunting and fishing community is like a microcosm of the country. We live in different areas but we all feel called to the outdoors.”
Sacred too is the responsibility of motherhood and looking out for the health of their babies. The Turner Foundation has been instrumental in raising awareness about the plight of pollinators linked to pesticide spraying. Concern about honeybees, which are essential workhorses in the multibillion-dollar fruit and produce industry, piqued a greater curiosity about the proliferation of chemicals in the environment that get ingested into the human body, a special interest of Laura Turner Seydel and her sister, Jennie Turner Garlington, both mothers. The Turner Foundation supports the Environmental Working Group that has catapulted bioaccumulation of toxic household chemicals to national attention, and locally in Atlanta it supports Mothers & Others for Clean Air, a coalition of eight environmental and public health organizations.
“It’s the first time that public health groups in Georgia have come together alongside environmentalists to look at how outdoor air quality affects the well-being of at-risk communities, especially children,” Turner Seydel says. “It’s a vulnerable population.” And the approach being adopted there is being emulated in other states.
Last Stand: Ted Turner's Quest to Save a Troubled Planet Page 34