Before he died at age 87 in early May, Ted Turner knew that stewardship of land would be his real legacy. Of course, he might also be long known for starting CNN and 24-hour news, as well as building a major league baseball team, his hometown Atlanta Braves.
He also started a UN Foundation to help bring peace to the world, thanks to his starter $1 billion contribution, and he tapped former U.S. Sen. Tim Wirth of Colorado to lead it. Wirth recalls how Turner, once dubbed “Captain Outrageous,” liked to shoot from the hip and could never be bothered by whatever passed as political correctness. A plaque on his desk in Atlanta said it all: “Lead, Follow or Get Out of the Way.”.
Most of all, Turner left a significant swath of private lands in better condition than he found them. In Montana and other parts of the Rockies, Turner bought huge ranches and made sure the land was healthy enough to grow a bison herd to over 55,000 animals at its peak.
Turner never subscribed to the notion that property rights trumped the common good. He also challenged the conviction that landowners ought to be able to do whatever they want on their land—even if it resulted in environmental harm.
As an entrepreneur with green intentions, Turner believed he could operate better and cheaper in recovering wildlife and rivers on his ranches that had been degraded by overgrazing. He was able to show that smart management also offered safe harbor to wildlife without sacrificing profit.
Some locals around Bozeman, Montana, in the 1980s thought Turner was out of his mind when he placed a conservation easement on his 113,000-acre Flying D Ranch, one of the largest easements in America at the time. The easement limited development in perpetuity, and had Turner exploited the Flying D as a real estate play, he could easily have made hundreds of millions in profit.
Turner could make a big impact on people. One was the billionaire businessman Thomas Kaplan, who likens Turner to a combination of John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt. Kaplan says Turner inspired him to co-found Panthera, now the leading global wildcat conservation organization, as well as The Orianne Society, named after his daughter and dedicated to perpetuating the survival of snakes.
Kaplan likes to recount how, when he visited Turner’s Flying D, he saw a wolf pack and howled back and forth with them. The ranch was home to the one of the largest, free-ranging wolf packs in North America, co-existing with Turner’s buffalo, and a population of elk, deer, moose and other wild animals that moved on and off the property.
Turner issued an edict that wolves visiting his land were never to be hunted or lethally controlled. Emulating the Turner model, Kaplan acquired thousands of acres in a vast wetland area of southwest Brazil called the Pantanal, and there he advanced a model of co-existence between cattle ranchers and jaguars. The Pantanal is considered the best place in the world for watching jaguars, and even cattle ranchers, who used to shoot the cats, now have eco-lodges on their estancias.
Turner was aware of his foibles, for which he hoped he would be forgiven. Biologist Mike Phillips, who oversaw a number of rewilding projects for Turner, told me, “In these recent years, as he was in decline, Ted once asked me, “Mike, we did okay, didn’t we?’ And I replied, “Ted, we accomplished exactly what we set out to do so long ago. I reminded him that he had done more as a private citizen to benefit native species than any other individual in the history of the world.”
Phillips said that Turner choked up with emotion.
Jane Fonda, Turner’s “third and favorite wife,” according to those who knew the couple, told me that after a brutal childhood with a hard-driving father who took his own life, along with a sister who died young from lupus, Turner found solace in nature.
“What did he want most of all? asked Fonda. “To be recognized as a good guy. There was a part of Ted who believed that by trying to save nature and bring more peace to the world, he could save himself. But he saved much more than that.”
Todd Wilkinson is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring conversation about the West. He is a longtime journalist and founder of Yellowstonian.org, who wrote an award-winning biography about Turner.
I read Wilkinson’s excellent biography of Turner when it first came out, over a decade ago. I so admire how Turner tried to re-wild as much of his land as possible. On his gigantic ranch in New Mexico, his biologists (led by his son Beau) have worked to bring Aplomado falcons back from the brink of extinction. Black-footed ferrets, native cutthroat trout, native plants, and of course bison and wolves have been greatly assisted by Turner’s policies. But even though he died a billionaire, Turner lost the vast majority of his fortune….tens of millions of dollars per day in the fiasco after the AOL/Time Warner merger. The tragedy of those losses is that they prevented him from saving much more land. His goal had been to restore and connect much larger areas. I contrast his efforts with those of Bezos and Musk, who have much larger fortunes and instead lavish those funds on mega-yachts, rockets, and promoting a president who is taking a wrecking ball to Earth and the world order. We need more leaders like Turner, Yvon Chouinard, Doug & Kris Tompkins, Thomas Kaplan, and biologists like George Schaller, who has persuaded governments around the world to preserve vast tracts of land to save imperiled wildlife. If Theodore Roosevelt were alive today, he would excoriate the Republican Party in its abandonment of real conservativism: conserving our precious natural resources. I once overheard a group of right-wing pilots at a party. One of them was bragging that he had chased a herd of bison in Montana by diving at them with his airplane. Of course, they were “Turner’s buffalo” so they were fair game since they belonged to that “liberal a#$.”