One Nation, Under Ted (Cont.)

Outside Magazine December 2001

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	Ted provides the cash and brash opinions.

MULTIPLY THAT CHICK THOUSANDS of times and you get an idea of the national scale involved here. From Ted Turner’s original southwestern Montana spreads—the 22,000-acre Bar None and the 114,000-acre Flying D—the Turner empire has mushroomed to include 20 properties that dip into nearly every North American ecosystem. A quarter-million acres of Nebraska sandhills. Another 138,000 in South Dakota. Forty thousand in the Oklahoma tallgrass prairie. The Vermejo Park Ranch in northern New Mexico, at nearly 600,000 acres, is the largest ponderosa-pine ecosystem in private hands. It joins Turner’s other New Mexico holdings—the 156,000-acre Ladder Ranch and 360,000-acre Armendaris Ranch, both near Truth or Consequences—to constitute 2 percent of the state’s land. At 63, Turner is now the single largest individual land-owner in the country; his personal chunk of America is 1.8 million acres and growing. Compare that to The Nature Conservancy, the nation’s largest land-conservation organization, which owns 1.6 million U.S. acres and manages 5.4 million more. The Turner empire is bigger than Delaware. It is enough mountain and valley and river and prairie that it could rank as the 48th-largest state.

This total does not include Ted’s international property, two estancias in Patagonia and one in Tierra del Fuego totaling another 128,000 acres. Recently, the Patagonian estates have served as fly-fishing retreats for Ted, who’s had sort of a bad year. In its January restructuring, AOL Time Warner put Turner out to pasture, and since then he’s been about as easy to interview as the banished ruler of an autocratic kingdom. When his nervous chamberlains finally made the arrangements, Turner and I conversed via speakerphone, as his scribes took down Ted’s pontifications to ensure accuracy on my part.



	Beau "eats, breathes, and sleeps" the work on the ground.

“I don’t want all the land, I just want the ranch next door,” Ted bellowed from his bunker at the CNN Center in Atlanta. “That’s a joke, of course,” he yelled, but of course he wasn’t joking. Turner buys land almost compulsively because, he boomed, “we’re heading for extinction at 90 miles per hour,” because “humanity is an endangered species.” As the brochures for Turner Enterprises proclaim, Ted’s dream is to manage these vast lands “in an economically sustainable and ecologically sensitive manner while conserving native species.”

Like all moguls, Ted is a notorious man of action, and he gets prickly with questions that seek reflection. When I tossed him a bunny about his land philosophy, he barked, “You’re the writer, I’m not getting paid to write this article!” When I tried flattering him about the wide range of carnivores now roaming the Flying D, he shouted: “We don’t have any grizzly bears. We don’t have any Indians!” That didn’t sound quite right, so he tried again. “We have Indians visit! And we’ve had some grizzlies walk through, but we don’t have any wolves, so we don’t have all the animals there.”

Ted Turner is one of our loudest citizens, which in this culture of cool television can be perceived as idiocy. He is also vulgar and reckless, qualities that obscure his more charming delphic gifts. Ted has pretty consistently put forward big, round concepts that later paid off: Whether it’s shrinking the world into a global village through cable television or forgiving Jane Fonda or fretting about our debt to the United Nations, he has a way of seizing on an idea with dramatic action (inventing CNN, marrying Jane Fonda, donating a billion to the UN). Now, by his estimation, he’s sunk at least $500 million into biodiversity and bison.

One could easily dismiss Turner’s purchasing escapades and eco-rhetoric as money-wasting billionaire hoohah. (His net worth, estimated at $4.8 billion in late September, puts Turner 25th on Forbes magazine’s list of the 400 richest Americans.) But when Turner, praised in the business media for hiring brilliant managers, handed the day-to-day implementation of his land ideas to Beau, the second-youngest of his five children, Ted’s paired instincts—make money, save planet—found fertile ground.

Together with his dad, Beau has developed these ideas into what one might call the Turner ethic, a mingling of the southern tradition of hunting-based conservation, a businessman’s eye for profit, and an environmentalist’s appreciation of beauty and biodiversity. In any five-minute period, Beau can coo about the red dot, complain bitterly about the commodity prices for buffalo bellies and pine timber, point his finger at a darting white-tailed deer and go “bang,” and improvise a symphonic paean to what the land looked like centuries ago.

When he talks about the past, the term “pre-Anglo” falls regularly from Beau’s lips. It’s a metaphor for discovery—for finding out what was lost in the East as we replaced millions of acres of forests with patchwork microenvironments, and in the West as we nearly eliminated bison, wolf, prairie dog, and other species from big-sky landscapes. If the work of colonial and industrial settling deflated once-thriving ecosystems in all these places, then the Turners seek nothing less than to reinstate the bustling climax landscapes that naturally thrived there. And in those redeemed ecosystems, to seize on what opportunities lurk for the entrepreneur. It’s a view of nature guaranteed to thrill and piss off everyone from Greenpeace to the beef industry.

To dream up these ideas is one thing. But with Beau in charge, Ted is nailing them to the ground, trying to find out what happens in messy, mucky practice—a fact that impresses even critics who aren’t always sure what the hubbub adds up to. “As I read what ecologists write, there’s always a hypothetical ‘what if’ tone, because they can’t do the experiment,” says Frank Popper, a Rutgers professor known for his Buffalo Commons theory, the idea that the Great Plains’ economic future lies in an ecological return to open prairie, and with it, bison. “Maybe what Turner is doing is a giant experiment—of how biodiversity would actually work, not in the lab or on a computer model, but on a scale that is appropriate for animals the size of buffalo and antelope.”

If so, the Turners’ vision “is of extraordinary importance,” says Dave Foreman, Earth First! founder and leader of the Wildlands Project, an initiative that works with Turner and others to link large swaths of wildlife habitat. “Aldo Leopold said that ‘one of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.’ The job of an ecologist is to be a land doctor. And some of the things they are doing on Turner’s ranches are the cutting edge of healing the wounds.”

Which is another way of saying that Ted Turner puts his money where his mouth is—and he rather famously has plenty of both.

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