One Nation, Under Ted (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine December 2001

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One Nation, Under Ted (Cont.)


	Mike Phillips, wolf czar, left Yellowstone National Park to run Turner's biodiversity programs.

RAISING WOODPECKERS in the East is one thing; restoring wolves and their chilling howl in the West is another. Out West, the sheer scale of land and humans’ long, troubled history with large carnivores means that wildlife restoration is not a garden-club nicety, but a political act that jeopardizes a “way of life.” The Turners have decided to champion the cow’s shaggy rival as well as bears, wolves, prairie dogs, and other animals perceived as pests. When Ted Turner—an Easterner and a billionaire and a guy with woolly eco-theories—showed up next door, the Welcome Wagon didn’t exactly wheel up to the ranch gates.

“In New Mexico, at least, he’s thumbed his nose at local custom and culture,” says Caren Cowan, the executive director of the Albuquerque-based New Mexico Cattle Growers’ Association. “He’s made statements that livestock or cattle should never have been raised in an arid climate like this. Given that we have three different ethnic cultures in New Mexico, some of which have raised livestock for up to 400 years, we feel that this is very insensitive to the local peoples.”

Cowan, a frequent Turner critic, is not as worried about bison on Ted’s property as she is about his reintroduction of undesirables to the neighborhood. “We have a lot more concerns with the endangered species he’s propagating. This organization has taken strong opposition to the whole reintroduction of the Mexican wolf.”

So far, Turner has never released a wolf on his property. He has only assisted—under provisions of the Endangered Species Act—the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, welcoming reintroduced wolves onto his land if they stray from public acreage, which they have done in New Mexico; maintaining captive holding or breeding programs for Fish & Wildlife on the Ladder Ranch and the Flying D; and monitoring Mexican wolves released into the Apache and Gila National Forests. But by hiring Yellowstone’s Mike Phillips as the architect of his wolf program, Turner has invited the wrath of most, but not all, of his fellow ranchers.

One cattleman who finds Turner’s notions worth studying is fourth-generation New Mexican Jim Winder, whose 125,000-acre Heritage Ranch sits ten miles south of Turner’s Ladder Ranch. Winder heads the Quivira Coalition, a group of ranchers and environmentalists trying to create ecologically healthy rangeland. Like Turner, he welcomes reintroduced wolves onto his property; he spotted a large radio-collared male there just last summer. But he also understands ranchers’ hostility. “The wolf presents itself as a cost to these ranchers,” he says, “and the economics of ranching are basically slow starvation. Talking about wolf recovery is like taking a drowning man and pouring a cup of water on his head.”

Winder isn’t worried about bison replacing cattle. “That’s still a specialty market,” he says. “Most ranchers think it’s a joke.” But he has joined an increasing number of western ranchers who are trying the same sustainable practices—pasture rotation and natural grazing patterns—that the Turners use. “I don’t believe their current business is economically wise,” Winder says. “But what Turner does that’s different is he puts a value on conservation. As I like to tell people, Ted Turner’s got the money of a small government, but not the bureaucracy. He’s able to accomplish a lot of things that an individual like me cannot.”

Winder believes that, for landowners of modest means, ecology has to pay for itself. And groups like The Nature Conservancy are sympathetic. “There is sometimes a sense of all or nothing in the environmental community,” says TNC president Steve McCormick from the organization’s Arlington, Virginia, headquarters. “In some cases, 100-percent conservation is not possible. So if you can get 90 percent because the landowner is getting some economic return and is motivated to keep the environmental quality, then that’s good. If the landowner thinks he has to either sell to conservationists or build condos, then the possibility of selling a few trees, for example, in a sustainable operation is much better.” In other words, a third way. “If ranchers weren’t so damn pigheaded," Winder says,"they would be studying what Turner is doing and figuring out how to make money from it. Ted Turner is offering a life preserver for ranchers; if you want to ranch, you better be studying what heÕs doing. We are."

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