Last Stand: Ted Turner's Quest to Save a Troubled Planet Read online

  Back around that time, during an interview with a local newspaper reporter in Bozeman, he had insinuated how he intended to escape his fishbowl existence in the city known as the Big Peach. He’s always loved Atlanta, but he was tired of being the Mouth of the South. He aspired to be somebody else. “I bought [this] place [the Flying D Ranch] to get away from people. If I wanted to be around people, I would have stayed in Atlanta. The only way to get access to a place like this is to do like I did and work hard forty or fifty years and make twenty-two million dollars and then go buy it for yourself. Me. I want to live as far away as I can from everybody. I am becoming a hermit. There is nothing wrong with that.”

  We will visit the hermit allusion again, later. But now consider Turner’s geographical coordinates in his dream. All of the capacious expanse between the Spanish Peaks and where he stands is within the actual deed to the Flying D, one of the finest ranches in the world, a property that he often says, in hindsight, radically changed his life. It renewed him. Once, he regarded the D as a trophy to mark his financial success; now it’s simply home—and it’s wilder and less cluttered with the trappings of a human footprint than when it first became his. He feels belonging.

  Turner returns to the march, and even in reverie he feels sweat beads on his forehead. He strides methodically, head down, watching his feet, careful not to trip on slippery scree.

  And then once again there it is. A wail catches his ear. He halts. The sound hovers in the air and blends into the howling wind. He twists to survey the misty panorama. Had he just been hearing things?

  In his peripheral vision, he sees an advancing blur. Bearing down, ambling downwind in a trot that will intersect his path, the black figure obviously does not know he’s there.

  His first thought? Grizzly. His second thought: I am unarmed. The anxiety shocks him nearly awake. But then a split second later, he notes this animal’s size and shape, its coat the tint of coal. Not a bear but a large wolf.

  The wolf walks toward Turner, and doesn’t halt until it has ventured close. Seeing Turner, it freezes, holding perfectly still. Each creature studies the other, awaiting a sign of intention. Turner is close enough to see even the moistness on the animal’s nostrils. The way the wind ruffles its fur. The glow of its eyes.

  “Okay wolfie,” he says softly in his baritone southern twang. “Okay fella, tell me what you want to do. Tell me what you’re thinking, boy. Has anyone ever told you that you’re a handsome looking wolf? I’m not going anywhere. Now, it’s your move.”

  A real moment—an encounter strikingly similar to that one—will soon be counted among Turner’s most memorable accomplishments: his first bona fide run-in with a wild wolf at short range, and it will take place behind his house. For years, he had wistfully mused about how such a meeting with Canis lupus might come to pass on land he owned. He thought it would occur, but feared it might not happen before he died. “I can relate to wolves,” he would simply say when friends asked him why he would welcome lobos on his back doorstep.

  Consummate underdogs forced to navigate the fringes of society—archetypes of controversy, beloved and reviled, charismatic and misunderstood—Turner holds wolves to be, along with bison, his totem creatures. “We only malign people and things we don’t understand,” he says. “We won’t harm the things that we regard as our friends. Sometimes, we just need to change the perspective on who our friends, and who our enemies, are.”

  Later on that day in 2008, having woken from his wolf dream, Turner waded into a Montana stream, casting for trout. Global financial markets were teetering on the brink of collapse, raising the specter of a coming Great Depression. Lehman Brothers, weeks before, was already gone. And Turner had just received a phone call, telling him that he’d lost millions in the meltdown of a bank. Though distracted, all he could think about was the provocative image of the wolf.

  Biologists whom Turner employs have advised him that in the remote possibility he ever stumbles upon a lobo or mountain lion on his forays at close range, he should raise his voice, shout at the top of his lungs to assert a dominant presence. He doesn’t know why, but in his dream he refrained from adhering to the protocol. He wasn’t afraid. He remembered why he had craved surges of adrenaline as a young businessman and mariner stalking opportunity.

  Soon enough, Turner will see a lone wolf in the flesh barely a stone’s throw from where this one visited him in his sleep.

  It is twenty years earlier. Nothing about this moment could be misconstrued as imaginary. Ted Turner’s pedal is pressed to the metal. He’s antsy, in a bother about how the day is getting away from him. He is on the run, full throttle, fueled by high-octane kinetic energy. As an instinct of survival embedded in his constitution, he will not allow himself to remain in one location longer than half a week. He is already anticipating his next move.

  His modus operandi is never stand still. Don’t over-romanticize that which cannot be undone. Don’t stand idle because it could allow feelings of personal pain to catch up. Don’t dwell on the past. Keep it at a safe distance by remaining in motion. Go. Go. Go.

  Always, the Turner of midlife is gazing forward into a future he believes he can create as a self-made man. He is known for being madcap yet brilliant, using intuition to uncannily look around corners and recognize business opportunity. He never edits the verbal articulation of his thoughts. He is direct and blunt and candid. He is not encumbered by worries of political correctness. He has caused even world leaders to blush.

  Yes, one of his trademark idiosyncrasies is being unpredictable, at least for those who think they have him pegged. Turner, at this moment, is behind the wheel of a white Land Rover fishtailing on a wet clay road in the Red Hills of the Florida panhandle. Also in the vehicle, his youngest son, Beau, and his chief caretaker at Avalon Plantation, Mr. Frank Purvis. Turner’s in a hurry. He’s crooning the refrain to Andy Williams’s song, “Born Free.” For good reason.

  Giddy, he wants to inspect the designated “release site” before darkness falls. With an early plane to catch out of Tallahassee in the morning, he wants to see the location so that when he’s back in Atlanta or on the road in business meetings, he can visualize in his own mind how the experiment, his experiment, went down.

  Turner does not recall, in hindsight, exactly when the notion of conducting this trial and error project first entered his head. But he was convinced he could succeed doing anything. In the late 1980s, his daring financial bets on cable television, the SuperStation, CNN, and media properties are paying huge dividends. He’s rolling in cash and is iconic, in a catbird seat. On a personal level, unbeknownst to most of his business associates, he also has hatched a little plan that he does not intend to circulate for public consumption. He has instructed his property managers to turn loose, in the coming days, two cougars and three black bears into the Avalon backwoods.

  The animals are part of a menagerie he assembled at another holding, his historic Hope Plantation in the South Carolina low country near Jacksonboro. Like George and Joy Adamson liberating Elsa the African lioness and restoring her to native ground in Kenya, Turner has similar aspirations for his big cats and bruins.

  “We’re going to liberate them, guys,” he tells Purvis and his son. “They may not have been born free, but they’re gonna live free.”

  He is well aware of the plight of the Florida panther battling extinction, and the fact that cougars have been eliminated from most of the South by centuries of human settlement. He has come to realize that while his pet animals in their caged compounds at Hope are fascinating novelties, and certainly he enjoys showing them off to guests, here they could have an impact. They could bring a raw untamed edge to his quail hunting preserve. And if they propagate, all the better. Believing his deeds noble yet benign, what would it hurt to try? After all, he has the land.

  In early March 1988, the plan was executed. The cats and bears were
set loose to wander around Avalon. Turner was pleased. The large mammals had never demonstrated any aggression toward people so he wasn’t worried they would eat anybody. He felt empowered as he sat in his office in Atlanta. And then the phone rang: One of the cougars had been struck and killed when it tried to cross a highway, shocking the motorist who ran into it. The trail led back to Turner.

  “It created quite a little buzz in these parts. Word travels fast,” recalls Leon Neel, an internationally recognized forester who specializes in longleaf pine restoration at Tall Timbers Reserve in Georgia, and was then working for Turner on a project at Avalon. “As well-intended as Ted was, I think he was told that you can’t just go out and turn a lion loose. Ted so wanted to make Avalon as wild as he could. I think most everyone found it more humorous than anything. I think he was the first to ever try such a thing. I know he was sad, kind of heartbroken, when one of the cougars died.”

  The incident, because of who Turner was, made national news, running in papers from New York City to Los Angeles. Game wardens wanted Turner to come in for questioning. They interviewed his employees. Turner told authorities that they weren’t to blame. They were only following his orders. He was charged with three misdemeanors, fined $1,500, and told in no uncertain terms that if he ever attempted a stunt like that again, he would go to jail. The remaining cougar was trapped and sent back to Hope; the bears were never captured.

  Genuinely contrite, Turner says the episode opened his eyes, humbling him but fueling his convictions. He couldn’t play God by flouting the law. But owning land gave him a license to act with an alacrity government doesn’t possess. He just needed more land. Cougars were on the verge of being declared extinct in the Southeast. And efforts to save the Florida panther were encountering fits and starts. He vowed to himself that he would find a place where large animals could have enough room to wander, where they wouldn’t be dodging cars on highways or getting accidentally shot or causing a ruckus. From then on, everything he did would be legit.

  Looking back, Mike Phillips has a theory. Phillips is a former government biologist who supervised earlier federal reintroductions of red wolves to the southeastern United States and gray wolves in Yellowstone National Park. Today, he oversees the Turner Endangered Species Fund. Reflecting on Turner’s action at Avalon Plantation, he says with a bemused expression. “Obviously, vigilantism is not the way to go and Ted knows it. You don’t, with good intentions, just start dumping animals into the backcountry. That’s not the way reintroductions are done from a scientific perspective. But you cannot fault his instincts. He sensed the loss of missing pieces and wanted to rectify it. He learned from the episode. If Ted is anything today, he’s a man who likes to operate from a sound foundation of science because that’s how you can achieve something that lasts.”

  What’s insightful, Phillips notes, is that the incident didn’t cause Turner to retreat but instead whetted his appetite. “I interpret it as Ted’s ecological foreplay. Here you had a man who was so excited in seeing the power that he had because of his emotional connection to nature, with his opportunities created by television, and owning relatively big pieces of land. His environmental awareness was starting to soar and he wanted to make a difference,” Phillips explains. “What happened at Avalon set the stage for what was yet to come. Ted looked west like so many others before him had for opportunity. As his fortune and land acreage grew, he became ready to engage in meaningful restoration and do it right, completely above board. He just had to think about how to take the next steps. I don’t think anyone could have realized then how big they’d be.”

  PART I:

  THE MAKING OF A

  GREEN CAPITALIST

  CHAPTER ONE

  Empire of Bison

  “I am a market fundamentalist just as I know Ted Turner to be a market fundamentalist. But here’s how I also understand the market. There are no free lunches. My conception of the free market is you own what you sell, pay for what you take, and choose what you buy . . . Most serious environmental problems involve a violation of all three of those market concepts in one way or the other. People take things that they don’t pay for, they sell resources that belong to the commons, and they stick other people with buying things, such as pollution, they didn’t choose to own. That is communism packaged under the façade of the free market. Ted is doing far more putting back into the land than he is taking. And he’s certainly not asking for preferential treatment the way the cattle industry has with massive subsidies.”

  —CARL POPE, FORMER EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF THE SIERRA CLUB

  Clarence “Curly Bear” Wagner had been told often that his face resembled the man on the buffalo nickel. He took it as high praise. A respected Blackfeet cultural historian, Wagner championed a number of social justice issues during his life. As a youth, he got involved with the fledgling American Indian Movement, joining activists who occupied Alcatraz Island in protest of government treaties. Later, he fought to have the remains of native people, collected by anthropologists and stored in museums, repatriated to the earth. And he dug dirt on an archaeological project at the Flying D Ranch.

  Curly Bear mused how odd it was that events in his life would lead to a convergence of shared passions with a famous businessman. Only in America, he said, could a kid who grew up poor on a reservation find a spiritual connection with a guy known to millions for doing the “tomahawk chop” on national television while rooting for a professional baseball team he owned called the Atlanta Braves.

  “That Ted Turner . . . he’s not your typical white man,” he told me.

  It is the summer of 1993. Wagner is next to Turner, who is saddled on a striking palomino horse. The hands of both men are crossed over their pommels. Wagner didn’t have to trailer his ride down from Browning, Montana, for the day. A pinto was provided for him by his host.

  Native people led by Wagner have arrived, at Turner’s invitation, to ceremonially harvest a bison at the Flying D Ranch and show Turner the myriad ways that the bison provides sustenance.

  Peeling away from a makeshift encampment of tepees, Turner and Wagner ride to survey the sight. They trot up a hill and stop at the upper lip of a coulee. A ravine trails downward and away, veering into the very heart of the Flying D. Blanketing both sides of the gully across a vista of several hundred acres, a dispersing group of bison cows and calves. The seeds of what will become the largest private bison holding in America.

  Wagner, though laconic, grunts his approval. He too imagined a view like this, based on stories told to him by his elders. His lineage in the Blackfeet Nation goes back as far as can be counted. It is possible that his ancestors could have wandered across this exact dale in the years before America was a country. Neither man knows what to say.

  Turner is uncomfortable with long awkward pauses in conversation. He will often speak up to fill the void. He and Wagner listen to the sounds of the herd, punctuated by bison calves of the year bawling for their mothers. Without having to admit it, they realize that what was once lost has now been restored, and in a way that many believed could not have happened.

  “I imagined this,” Turner finally says, his voice trailing off. “Years ago. Before CNN, before TBS, before any of it.” He doesn’t admit it out loud, but he attributes the making of the scene to kismet.

  Turner’s attachment to bison started during an admittedly lonely childhood. He was shuttled between Ohio, his birthplace, and boarding schools, as part of his father’s regimen for toughening him up. He counts among his favorite memories those spent at a grandfather’s farm in Mississippi, and later around the low country near Savannah, Georgia, and Charleston, South Carolina. He chased polliwogs, climbed trees, caught fish, let baby alligators swim in bathtubs, and hunted woodlots with a bb gun. “My closest friend, no matter where I got carted off to, was Jimmy Brown. He was a black man my dad hired to look after me. He had grown up in the back swa
mps. He was descended from Gullah slaves.”

  Brown shepherded Turner into the outdoors—and introduced him to sailing, hunting, fishing, and beachcombing. “I could disappear into it, and feel as if I wasn’t missing out on anything else in my life. It was where I had my thoughts and not someone else’s to answer to. It was one of the few places where I never felt lonely,” he says.

  The first word Turner ever uttered clean, according to his mother, was “pretty”—in response to seeing a butterfly. As a boy, he became a collector of trinkets, a habit that continues to this day. Among his prized possessions were buffalo nickels. He carried them in his trouser pockets. He would rub them together, hoping superstitiously they would give him magical powers and good luck. “Someday, I’m gonna . . .” he would say to himself, closing his eyes and making a wish. Looking back, he realizes the significance of the coins though he was never able to articulate it during the early decades of his business career.

  On one side of the nickels was the profile of a bison and, on the other, the silhouette of a plains Native American brave.

  Bison are animals that, in too many ways to count, reflect Turner’s values, even his convictions on human rights, equality for women, and compulsions as an environmentalist.

  “I would feel terrible whenever I went to the movies as a kid and saw a western [film]. The plots never changed. The cavalry or the cowboys would be killing off Indians, who were almost always portrayed as menaces, even though they were the ones trying to hold onto what they had. Nobody ever asked them why they were mad. What was it they did wrong, I wondered. They were victims, and I sympathized. Then I realized—I don’t remember exactly how old I was—that the same kind of thing had happened to bison.”