Ted Turner was a visionary genius

With the passing of Ted Turner most of the obituaries and articles that I have been reading talk about his legacy with CNN and broadcasting. Very few have mentioned his true legacy and the reason why this man will be remembered for generations, if not centuries into the future.

He's single-handedly amassed over 2 million acres of land and then created a conservatory, that cannot be sold, cannot be divided up, and can never be developed. Those are precious acres of grasslands where tens of thousands of bison are now roaming, and in the process he has restored entire ecosystems, wow creating a network of ranchers that are totally self-sustaining.

Though a multi-billionaire, he set aside a few million dollars for his kids and the rest went to the conservatory, which I think is absolutely brilliant. This man is a true American hero and visionary.

So many billionaires these days are so self-absorbed and doing very little for society, and yet this giant is a man who has truly made a difference.

Ted Turner, the media mogul who died on Wednesday at 87, was one of the country’s largest private landowners, amassing roughly two million acres across the United States, and established himself as an unlikely pioneer of land conservation.

Mr. Turner bought his first bison in 1976 and his first ranch 11 years later in Montana. He remained an active buyer of land well into the 2020s. At the time of his death, he owned 13 ranches spread across six states, according to Turner Enterprises. At more than 500,000 acres, his Vermejo Park Ranch, in northern New Mexico extending into southern Colorado, is one of the two largest pieces of private contiguous land in the country, and is a swath of land about the size of Canyonlands National Park, Zion National Park and the Redwood National Park combined. When Mr. Turner acquired the ranch in 1996, it was an overgrazed, degraded landscape. Over three decades, he transformed it into an ecosystem that is both ecologically and economically sustainable, with 1,200 Castle Rock bison raised for grazing and meat. A 60-mile stream restoration brought back the native Rio Grande cutthroat trout, the largest inland trout restoration project in North America, according to “Preserved,” a 2025 documentary about Vermejo.

“The whole point of creating a sustainable model out there was that it would be self sustaining,” Ben Clark, the director of “Preserved,” said. “They’d be able to drive enough revenue and balance the ecological benefits at the same time as pushing science” forward and making ecological advancements. Mr. Clark pointed out that beavers, a keystone species, have returned to the area. “Suddenly you get the architect of the entire ecosystem in there,” he said of them.

Mr. Turner purchased nearly 600,000 acres from Pennzoil in 1996 for $80 million, or around $138 an acre. A ranch that sold in northern New Mexico last November was listed for $700 an acre, and another that listed for $1,918 an acre sold in December, according to Land.com. “That’s a major hockey stick upward in land value in a pretty short amount of time,” Mr. Rand said.

Mr. Turner’s passion was bison conservation.

Tens of millions of bison once roamed the American West, before they were slaughtered to the brink of extinction by the early 1900s. Today there are around 400,000 bison in North America, with almost 200,000 of them residing on private farms and ranches in the United States. Around 45,000 of those bison are on Mr. Turner’s land, the largest private herd in North America.

“He is one of these people that understood that if bison thrive, grasslands thrive and communities thrive,” Mr. Calvelli said. “He was singular in that.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/07/realestate/ted-turner-ranch-land-legacy.html?smid=nytcore-android-share

Edited May 7May 7 by spidermike007