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Outside Magazine December 2001

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One Nation, Under (Cont.)


	Birdland: Greg Hagan cradles a woodpecker chick.

BEAU TURNER'S ZEAL for the outdoors is apparent the minute a housekeeper opens the front door at Avalon Plantation, with its columns and its stone dogs and a Civil War cannon out front. Piled in a great heap on the delicate furniture of the drawing room, anticipating Beau’s later arrival, is a cargo hold of equipment: seven fishing poles, several rifles, boxes of ammo, a longbow, a crossbow, three tackle boxes, seven pairs of boots for every imaginable terrain, and a machete.

Beau’s interest in the outdoors began on the family’s plantations in South Carolina. Outside Charleston are two Old South spreads, Hope Plantation and St. Phillips Island, that Ted bought in the late 1970s. “I grew up hunting and fishing there,” Beau says about Hope, “but it was Pop who encouraged us to really find out what was on the other side of the door.” Given the inclinations of Turner fils, it was not much of a decision for Turner père to tap his youngest son to oversee the properties when it came time to divvy up the next generation’s responsibilities. (All of Turner’s other children—Laura Turner Seydel, 40; Teddy Jr., 38; Rhett, 35; and Jennie Turner Garlington, 32—are involved in the family’s environmental work, but none to the same extent Beau is.)

“I remember the day I graduated from the Citadel,” Beau says, recalling that spring of 1991. “Pop was talking to me afterwards about what to do next. I had been accepted to Wharton Business School. And he said I should think about the environment.” Beau describes it as the turning point of his life, as if he can’t quite believe he almost went to a fancy eastern business school. Instead he went to Montana State and started on a master’s in wildlife biology.

By this time western ranches had become the bauble of choice for the billionaire crowd, but Ted wasn’t buying livestock just to complete the cowboy postcard outside some 18-bedroom log mansion. Rather, he set out to redeem the buffalo—an interest that dated back to Ted the kid collecting buffalo nickels, and one that got a little eccentric as Ted maintained a proto-herd on his South Carolina land in the 1970s.

When Beau took over the species work in 1993, the operation snowballed. In 1992 Ted had added a New Mexico property, the Ladder Ranch, to the two Montana ranches, and in 1993 bought the 12,000-acre Snowcrest Ranch, southwest of Bozeman, Montana. The slow accretion of property continued, one or two ranches a year, with high marks like the 1996 purchase of the 580,000-acre Vermejo Park Ranch west of Raton, New Mexico. All the while the Turners were hiring scientists, adding bison, and developing restoration programs.

“Ted has said he would not have been so aggressive in the acquisition of land if not for the interest and abilities of Beau,” says Mike Phillips, the star wildlife biologist hired away from Yellowstone National Park in 1997 to run

"An ecologist is a land doctor," says the Wildlands Project's Dave Foreman. "The Turners are at the cutting edge of healing the wounds."

the endangered-species programs. “Beau’s biggest strength is his passion—unending passion and unending enthusiasm for proper land stewardship. This guy is caught hook, line, and sinker. He eats it, he breathes it, he sleeps it.”

Today, if Ted is the visionary CEO of Planet Turner, Beau is the practical-minded CFO. From its headquarters in Bozeman, not far from the Flying D, the operation is broken down by mission: Turner Enterprises is a for-profit group trying to earn money from the properties by cutting timber, running big-game hunts ($13,000 per elk hunt at the high end), and ranching bison, whose lean meat is sold to upscale groceries and restaurants. The Atlanta-based Turner Foundation is the charitable arm, its trustees Ted and the kids, giving away $44 million in 574 grants last year to every environmental and population-control group imaginable, from $15,000 for Wild Alabama to $500,000 for the National Wildlife Federation. The Bozeman-based Turner Endangered Species Fund is the field operation for the properties, spending $1 million of Turner Foundation money last year on species-restoration programs for listed critters and greenery like the Mexican wolf and the blowout penstemon. As one employee told me, “Turner Enterprises makes the money, the Foundation gives away the money, and the Fund spends the money.”

On the ground, each western ranch manager reports to a single chieftain, Russ Miller, who has managed the ranching business since 1992. His bio-diversity counterpart is Mike Phillips, a renowned bigfoot in wolf restoration. Another sign of the scale the Turners operate on is the arrival of Mike Finley, the new president of the Turner Foundation, and former superintendent of Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Everglades National Parks. When the ranch managers get together twice a year, as they did this August in Bozeman, the agenda runs from bison herd projections to fire management to community outreach.

The main business is still bison. Ted now owns 8 percent of the country’s population—27,000 head. With wholesale prices for live bison dropping, though, he recently decided to try to stimulate the demand side. He intends to open five restaurants next year called Ted’s Montana Grill. Run by his eldest son, Teddy Jr., and supplied by Beau, the Grills will sell bison burgers but also regular hamburgers and even chicken. “We’ve got a motto,” Beau says slyly. “‘Nobody beats our meat!’” It’s not clear he’s kidding.

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