https://writersontherange.org/ted-turner/ Syndicated Opinion for the American West Sun, 07 Jun 2026 23:23:27 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.0 https://writersontherange.org/ted-turner/#comment-1163 Tue, 02 Jun 2026 10:01:06 +0000 https://writersontherange.org/?p=11046#comment-1163 […] the link to read the article on the Writers on the Range website (Todd […]

]]> https://writersontherange.org/ted-turner/#comment-1161 Mon, 25 May 2026 14:35:32 +0000 https://writersontherange.org/?p=11046#comment-1161 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#$.”

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