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

by Todd Wilkinson

  As Turner Seydel learned about how chemicals can disrupt the endocrine system, crucial to the human immune system in fighting off diseases, she also became fluent in the cause of an escalation in kids suffering from asthma and chronic respiratory illness. Together, Ted Turner, Laura Seydel Turner, and her children all had blood work done to see the level of exposure as carried across generations. Startling, the adults had a wider array of agents because of longevity but the children had higher percentages of synthetic toxins in their system—something that should be of concern to all parents in the twenty-first century. Another fascinating correlation is that Jean-Michel Cousteau, son of the late Jacques-Yves Cousteau, notes that longer-lived marine life also bio-accumulates toxic agents in its fatty tissue. “It all relates to the stuff floating around in the water and air we’re taking in and don’t even realize,” Turner Seydel says.

  Gerald L. Durley is a pastor at Providence Missionary Baptist Church in Atlanta, the same church where the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. delivered some of his memorable sermons. Clergyman Durley says there is a subtle element of racism within the mainstream American environmental community. It isn’t that environmental groups, especially conservation organizations involved in wildland protection, have ill feelings toward African Americans; it’s that they assume blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and American Indians have no interest in nature-related experiences synonymous with Caucasian America. The same applies for ethnic groups being involved in activism.

  “In order to attend the dance, you first have to be asked,” Durley says. “My advice for the environmental organizations is that you make an invitation to people of color to get involved in environmental organizations. If you get kind of an indifferent response, don’t walk away. Come back again, seek out the right people. Call me and I’ll help put you in touch with the right individuals. We in the black community aren’t uninterested in environmental issues. We’re starved of attention.”

  Someone else in Atlanta who increasingly is making a connection between biblical scripture spoken from the pulpit and the importance of healthy outdoor environs in parishioners’ lives is minister Bernice Albertine King, the second daughter and youngest child of the late and legendary Dr. King. She was only five years old when her father was tragically killed. She describes herself today as one of Turner Seydel’s friends and students, enamored with the concept of “creation care,” i.e., the notion that those who believe in God have a duty to be caretakers of the natural world. And she has no doubt that had her father lived, he would be embracing environmentalism as another important facet of social justice and civil rights.

  For her part, Turner Seydel commends King and Durley. She is hoping to get the multiracial Captain Planet cartoons running nationally on television again because they reach kids in the home. She also is using the Captain Planet Foundation to encourage young inner city students to pursue careers in the sciences.

  Durley says that Seydel, like her father, is a green missionary who recognizes the nurturing sanctuary quality of parks and the pastoral countryside. From their ongoing interaction, Laura helped Durley and King realize how climate change threatens to affect the lives of those in the pews at Providence Missionary Baptist and other churches. “Urban temperatures are likely to rise. We could be facing water shortages. There could be an expansion of tropical diseases shifting north,” Durley says.

  Durley and King have served as key catalysts in rallying together ministers and parishioners around Atlanta to see showings of director Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth, which featured Al Gore, and HBO documentary Too Hot Not to Handle. Both of these projects were spearheaded by the noted climate change activist Laurie David, who came to Atlanta and screened the films. Durley and King say they started to see connections that weren’t readily apparent before.

  After Turner Seydel handed them copies of Richard Louv’s book, Last Child in the Woods (about the growing pandemic of “nature deficit disorder”), Durley says, “It hit me over the head like a brick. I felt like he was speaking to me and to the families of kids in my congregation. The environment is a civil rights issue that has not been on our radar screen.”

  Withdrawing into the safety of their living rooms based on an irrational fear of the outdoors, and becoming entranced by video games rather than plugging into the colorful sights, smells, and sounds of living things, is a problem for many, many inner city youth.

  “So much of learning is passed down parent to child and teacher to child,” Laura says. “We have generations of people who have been cut off from regular contact with nature. It’s awfully hard for a child to develop an awareness if no one is exposing it to them and telling them about what they’re seeing and letting them know they can have a safe inspiring place.”

  No segment of the Turner Foundation’s work resonates more personally with Turner than its support of the Turner Youth Initiative, Finley says. As the reach of Turner’s land empire grew, he was sensitive to the prevailing perception of many wealthy outsiders coming into regions to recreate—essentially to take from local communities and benefit from them—without offering goodwill in return.

  The Turner Youth Initiative has given millions of dollars in grants to a huge array of grassroots projects led by young people in the communities near Turner’s properties. Projects have gone out to more than half a dozen states, as well as villages around his estancias in Argentina.

  A shining recent example is a $60,000 grant in Bozeman that has given way to the “bio-bus,” says Bob Buzzas, who worked with Mike Finley’s daughter, Devon, in overseeing projects in Montana. “Bio-bus is an exemplary illustration of what I love most about the work of the youth initiative,” Buzzas says. High school kids came up with an idea to create literally a green bus that operates as a portable greenhouse growing vegetables that travels around from school to school touting the value of healthy eating and teaching kids how they can grow gardens at home. An old bus was overhauled and retrofitted with environmentally friendly greenhouse glass, plant boxes, and a rain water collector.

  “The lesson that the Turner Youth Initiative tries to impart is never sell kids short. He sees young people taking the virtues espoused in Captain Planet and putting a human face on them,” Ms. Finley said one afternoon in Helena, Montana, where students from Helena High School were working with administrators to create a more youth-friendly lounge next to the cafeteria. “Recipients of grants have opened youth centers, radio stations, worked in facilities for senior citizens, designed skateboard parks, conducted exotic weed control, started popular energy conservation and recycling projects, and showed their parents, in some cases, what responsible citizenship is,” Finley says.

  Students are required to draft a business plan and create a structure for administering the money, carrying their projects out to fruition. No adult meddling is involved, which initially left some “helicopter” parents in local communities, accustomed to micro-managing their kids’ activities, feeling uneasy.

  Some of the money, in South Carolina near Hope Plantation, has been used to create a safe after-school environment for kids in areas where gang crime is a problem. Tutors await youngsters of all ages when they get off the bus, help them with school work, give them something to eat (knowing it might be the last healthy meal they have until the morning), and allow them to play and just be kids.

  Other efforts have involved recycling drives, park projects, and bicycle banks in which abandoned bikes are collected from local police departments, fixed up, and then distributed free of charge to other kids around the community. Some have failed from disorganization; others have led to lasting benefits.

  “I remember in the beginning, going back a number of years after Ted first arrived on the scene in Montana. We did encounter a bad perception of him from some local people,” Buzzas says.

  “We rolled out some teenager-led projects that went through fits and starts. Some people said th
at Ted was merely trying to buy himself goodwill. What the parents didn’t realize is that the possibility of hitting and missing with some of the projects was anticipated. In fact, that was the whole point, Ted’s point.”

  The unofficial mandate handed down from Finley and the Turner children is that the foundation has a low profile. It’s fine that the kids gain publicity for their efforts but they are not expected to deliver a sound bite for the Turner family. Turner himself doesn’t see the work as a gamble or a waste. He calls it “some of the best millions of dollars I’ve ever invested.”

  As he likes to say, “We’re trying to give the kids in these towns a license to fail. Money that’s available for kids is in short supply everywhere. What’s important is not that they succeed, but that they dream and try to succeed and give it their best with few strings attached. The most important lessons I’ve learned in my life have all come from failure and disappointment. For every victory there were ten times as many smaller defeats and sometimes some pretty big ones. It’s the same philosophy I’ve tried to take with my own kids. Real confidence that holds up under challenges doesn’t come from doing easy things or those you are good at. It comes from figuring out how to succeed by expanding your repertoire.”

  It’s true for the Turner kids as well. Rutherford Seydel, Laura’s attorney husband, arrives at their Buckhead home, “Ecomanor,” in a hybrid vehicle. He has an hour before attending a meeting in Atlanta organized by the Energy Future Coalition. Now, he stands in front of a kitchen wall console, like Spock from Star Trek, taking readings from all of the sensors on the Enterprise.

  The console is futuristic and cutting edge: It enables the Seydels to know how much solar energy was produced that day on the roof, how much water and electricity was used, temperatures in different rooms, and how that translates into saving money. It is the brain of an organic home that has elements that live and breathe. “If the kids leave a light on or the faucet running before they leave for school, we know,” he says.

  In 2003, high winds blew through Atlanta and sent a two-hundred-year-old southern oak crashing down on the roof of a cottage they had hoped to use as guest quarters. The damage was so significant that they saw it as an opportunity to retool their footprint.

  Ecomanor (www.ecomanor.com) cost $1.5 million to build, 10 percent more because of its green engineering figures, but a sum well within the norm of what properties of similar size go for in Buckhead. They found collaborators with a number of green material companies, and after Ecomanor was built, started giving public tours.

  Their energy costs are now between 80 and 90 percent below those of a comparable home, and they see savings in their water bill as well. During the recent drought in Atlanta, underground cisterns that served as catchments for rare rain enabled the couple to have water for their landscaping, at the same time a watering ban, using municipal supplies, had been imposed on Atlanta residents. Climbing to their rooftop attic and stepping outside in a crow’s nest viewing area, Rutherford points to the solar panels and says that he hopes to one day make money by selling excess electricity back into the grid.

  “What people don’t realize is that alternative energy will enable citizens, wherever they live, to become eco-entrepreneurs. I don’t know what is more conservative than striving to be self-sufficient and turn a profit by being smart,” Rutherford says.

  “We need to give Americans a means to make better, more informed choices,” Rutherford says. “I’m not emphasizing this point to justify what Laura and I have done. I’m trying to suggest that pointing fingers and demonizing people doesn’t work. Gentle persuasion works better, showing that you can actually save money by making smarter environmental decisions. If people can see part of their own lives reflected in what we are doing, it makes them much more willing to listen.”

  The tradeoff that Laura and Rutherford made in constructing Ecomanor has to do with sacrificing privacy and putting a target out there for critics to aim at. They’ve heard the rebukes: that it is a monument to their own egos, too big, too lavish, completely unnecessary, and, in the end, sending the wrong message.

  Chuckling, Rutherford says, the perception is that progressive environmentalists are turning into lifestyle cops, inflicting their own Orwellian version of social Darwinism. “But it’s not true,” he says. “At the end of the day, if we are parents with a conscience, we know there is a responsible direction we need to go.”

  One of the reasons they open their home to tour groups is to help others understand the practical application of energy efficiency and environmentally friendly design. “When people see it in action, they know they can do it themselves.”

  Laura acknowledges that part of her motivation was to show her father that she could be pioneering in her own way, too. “Dad casts a pretty big shadow,” she says. “He’s a pretty competitive guy who is used to leading, and if he has the opportunity to do something first, he would rather do it than wait for someone else. At the same time, he is incredibly supportive of us kids finding our own niches.”

  Some of the lessons learned from Ecomanor have been availed to Turner as he pursues construction projects on his western properties, including an adobe home in the Chihuahuan Desert of New Mexico that employs both thermal and solar heating and cooling.

  Maybe the most effective weapon the Turner Foundation is using to reach people is food, by working with George McKerrow, cofounder of Ted’s Montana Grill Restaurants, now in fifty locations across the country.

  “If you have access to multiple platforms for reaching people, as Ted does,” Finley says, “Why not use them?”

  Beyond noting the benefits of eating healthy meals, Finley and McKerrow are using the cachet of Turner to tout how reducing waste and energy use in eating establishments saves proprietors money and helps reduce America’s carbon footprint.

  “It’s great to tell individual citizens to change out the light bulbs they use at home for energy efficient ones, but where you really get gains is when groups like the National Restaurant Association tell their members that by adopting environmental measures as part of their best business practices it enhances their own prosperity and shows their patrons they care about the impact they are having on local communities,” Finley says.

  “Ted is just as excited about a little start-up company like Ted’s Montana Grill as he was about starting a new network or buying the Braves. He likes the challenge of being in a new venture and watching it grow and mature. He always finds a new angle on old ways of doing things,” McKerrow says. “For him, it always comes back to doing something on behalf of the environment.”

  McKerrow talks about how Turner’s influence has caused him to assess how to run a restaurant with things he didn’t think much about when he earlier built the LongHorn Steakhouse concept into national prominence.

  “We get approached all the time. We had a bottled water purveyor approach us with a very attractive packaging. My response was, ‘Sorry but how much fuel is being used to transport one bottle halfway around the world.’ The other thing we frown on is plastic. We try to set the tone with our suppliers, with our dining customers and give our competitors something to look at. The best way to drive an innovation in the restaurant business is to have a profitable operation based on the ideas you are espousing.”

  In 2012 McKerrow told the Atlanta Journal Constitution, “At Ted’s Montana Grill, it took us ten years to be an ‘overnight success.’ Ted’s capital is the only reason we’re here. The recession hit and we lost 20 percent of our sales. We had to close underperforming locations. Ted never gave up. He could have bailed out. We started losing a couple of million dollars a year, and he had to give us the money to keep the doors open.”

  Perseverance paid off. “Now, we are becoming a profit center,” McKerrow said. “Our goal is to double the size of the company to eighty-eight restaurants by 2021. We’ll do it all with internally generated cash
.”

  “Dad does not tell us how to live our lives, except to say that if you’re going to do something, be passionate about it, and if you have a choice between doing what’s good or bad for the environment, do the good thing,” Laura Turner Seydel says. “What’s in a person’s heart and conscience never lies.”

  On Ted Turner’s desk in Atlanta rests a copy of a book that a friend had passed along, 1,000 Places to See Before You Die: A Traveler’s Life List. He flips through a couple of pages. He doesn’t have a bucket list of things he needs to do or posh resorts to be pampered at, or any human wonders to see in order for him to feel complete. He has a different set of destinations in mind.

  And he’s already given a lot of thought to what will happen after he’s gone. Money, he knows, can make people do funny things. He has no desire to hover over his children as a specter, but he does want the natural empire he’s built to stay intact and flourish, to not be busted up in probate.

  He trusts that his children will honor this wish. He also has instructed his financial chieftain Taylor Glover to draft his will, specifying that all properties, upon his death, be subsumed into the Turner Foundation, to be overseen by its trustees—his children—and a few selected administrators, with the hope that it will involve his grandchildren and their children and so on. Two-thirds of his estate is tied up in land and related investments. And he does not want the momentum that he’s gathered to eliminate nukes, enable the UN, promote biodiversity protection, and confront climate change to perish, either. That’s why he’s taking steps to plan for how the initiatives will continue and remain funded after he is gone. “Philanthropy needs to try and be self-perpetuating,” Turner says.