 Outside Magazine December 2001 |
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One Nation, Under Ted (Cont.)
ON CHERRY CREEK, as on most of these lands, the difference between Turnerism and environmentalism could not be starker. Those suing don't trust the hand of man to fix our mistakes. The Turners believe that when the environment is busted, benign neglect is also a choice, and often a bad one. So they take action, cause trouble, get people talking. Maybe that's the point. "Our logic," says Phillips, "is if you can provide a stunning example of something, it sometimes prompts people to do things they would not have done otherwise. We're trying to excite and motivate others to be good stewards." According to The Nature Conservancy's McCormick, mini-Teds are already popping up. Telecommunications magnate John Malone is buying up his own empire and preserving it through conservation easements, legal riders in which, by relinquishing development rights, landowners can ensure their land's preservation in perpetuity. Several of Turner's properties, including the Flying D, the Bar None, and Avalon Plantation, carry easements through The Nature Conservancy; after Ted's death, the properties will go into a trust, which his children will manage until the last one passes away. Then the trust will revert to the Turner Foundation.
But the ambition stretches beyond the family's own growing acreage. The Turners are at the forefront of a movement to reinvent land management with an eye toward big-picture ecology—to blur the boundaries between public and private land and let vast migration corridors open up, allowing keystone species like wolves, grizzlies, elk, and mountain lions to take back the North American range. "The truth is that there is no way to build a large-carnivore conservation program without public lands," Phillips says, swinging his legs over the bridge. "No private landscape is big enough to support it. You must have both." In the end, he says, the Turners intend to continue linking up with efforts on public lands (which abut many of the family properties) to force a reconsideration of what we think when we think about wildness. On the Flying D, that might involve a pretty picture of bison grazing on a montane range, part of a robust system of flora and fauna that includes the natural stress of large carnivores and their natural predators, Homo sapiens, as well.
"I see a day when we'll add wolves to the hunt here," Beau says, "when the bison population supports it, maybe even needs it." Of course, on the Flying D, the wolf will never be the main force thinning the herd. Ted's Montana Grill will. And the hunting and fishing business will help maintain a balance in the aquaculture and among the game animals like elk, deer, and even wolf. That's the business side. The aesthetic side, even the spiritual side, is to have a landscape teeming with as much biodiversity as the nutrient content in the soil and the dynamics of plant, bird, and mammal will permit. It is a neo-romantic view, one that sees a kind of beauty in the red dot of the RCW flitting among trees, made beautiful not by its mystery, but by our understanding of why it's there. After aeons of forcing the land to conform to our demands and economies, by backing off some of the ecosystems we do use, we might begin to see the dynamic of nature differently.
"The wolf is just another critter in the woods, if we understand what he's doing and why he's doing it," Beau says.
"No more right or wrong than a rabbit," Phillips adds. Just another animal on the land, trying to get along, like us.
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