Ted Turner the caricature is the type of person Midwesterners love to hate: rich, abrasive and a know-it-all. Or at least that's what many of us understood about him during his quest for the America's Cup (he won the sailing race in 1977), the founding of CNN, and as the owner of just about everything a person might want, including nearly 2 million acres of ranchland flush with fish and wildlife.
But a new book about Turner by a native Minnesotan paints a much more generous picture of the media mogul turned conservationist, and suggests some of Turner's ideas about land, water and wildlife stewardship could play vital roles in sustaining life as we know it — for everyone.
Titled "Last Stand. Ted Turner's Quest to Save a Troubled Planet" (Lyons Press, 372 pages, $26.95), the book consumed author Todd Wilkinson for the better part of seven years, partly because Turner notoriously had been wary of journalists and unwilling to reveal much about his personal life.
Turner's marriage to actress Jane Fonda in 1991 and the endless media curiosity that followed perhaps caused him to withdraw even more.
Wilkinson, who grew up in Mora and graduated from St. Olaf, first interviewed Turner in 1992. By then, Turner had purchased the largest ranch in Montana, the Flying D, and was introducing controversial ideas about how it should be managed.
"When I first interviewed Ted, I asked him what his vision was for the ranch, and he said he wanted to restore wildness to the land," said Wilkinson, who lives in Bozeman, Mont.
Turner began by selling the ranch's cattle and replacing them with bison. He also tore down fences, essentially trying to re-invent the Flying D as it was pre-settlement. Though Turner hunts and is an avid fly fisherman, his intent wasn't to manage the land for its recreational benefit. Instead, he thought cattle were too destructive to the ranch's grasslands, and that reintroducing bison would be a first move in a long-range effort to return the land to elk, wolves, mule deer, white-tailed deer and grizzlies, in addition to bison, which he intended to raise for profit.
Today, Turner also owns ranches in New Mexico, Kansas, South Dakota, Oklahoma and Nebraska. His intent with each is the same: produce enough income to sustain the lands as he wants them.