News Release

Beau Turner shares his passion for nature with kids

April 4, 2008
Contact: Patricia Behnke, 850-410-5291; cell 850-251-2130

Beau Turner, a powerful environmentalist, is fighting for a world where children have every opportunity to touch the face and hear the voice of Mother Nature.

Turner, the son of Ted Turner of CNN fame, has vowed to do all he can to provide youngsters with opportunities to explore nature and the treasure trove of wonders it offers. A solid step toward this goal became a reality when he formed a partnership with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) this year with the opening of the Beau Turner Youth Conservation Center south of Tallahassee. The center, the first of its kind in Florida, opened in March on 160 acres Turner has leased to the FWC.  The goal for the center is to develop a stewardship ethic among youth through programs designed to develop their outdoor skills and to instill an appreciation and knowledge of the longleaf pine ecosystem and wildlife management techniques.  Officials with the FWC say Turner has been involved in every step of opening the center, which offers free classes to youths.

At 40, Turner hardly looks his age. Only in bright daylight can you detect isolated single gray strands in his slightly shaggy brown hair. His green eyes seem always to be focused except when he closes them in deep concentration. His hands slice the air for emphasis when talking about his various ecological projects.

On Wednesday, April 9, some of Florida’s most powerful environmental legislators and FWC commissioners will gather at the youth center to hear Turner share his philosophy on ecology and community and to celebrate the partnership between the FWC and Turner.

“This center is just one of the pieces of the puzzle,” Turner said. “There is no other real opportunity for kids to sign up and do the things they can do here. And everything is free.”

The activities at the center include fishing in the pond, practicing on the Olympic-style archery and 3-D archery courses, shooting on the rifle and shotgun ranges, which use solar-powered throwers and biodegradable targets, hiking nature trails and viewing wildlife.

“Kids don’t know where food comes from,” Turner said. “I find that frightening. We need to educate them so they can see the connection.”

Florida’s youth conservation center serves as a model, Turner said. He plans to use the model to create others of its type on ranches owned by the Turners across the country and in South America. The Turner family is the largest private landowner in the United States, with nearly 2 million acres in its holdings. The younger Turner runs the land operations of the Turner Foundation, which is why the New York Times stated in 2000, “Arguably, Beau Turner is already the most influential citizen/environmentalist in the nation.”

All of Ted’s five children are involved some way in the environment, but Beau works on a local level. He believes rural communities provide the perfect setting for making a difference in the life of a youth.

“My dad recently committed these lands to conservation after he dies,” Turner said. “I don’t know of any other individual who has done so much for the environment.”

Turner looks the part of the outdoors man with scuffed work boots and a snake-skin belt. He was reared in Georgia, and his slightly gravelly voice reflects a trace of a honey-baked drawl. His skin looks a little red with just a trace of sunburn.

“I live, work and recreate in the outdoors,” Turner said. “For relaxation, I go sleep in the woods. The ranches we own are just extended families for me, and I’m rarely away from any of them. That’s my passion.”

He’s a lean 6-foot-2 with long, slender fingers that look well-suited for playing the piano, but he never took a lesson. His life is nature. The back of the small station wagon he drives from the center to his home nearby bears a bumper sticker that reads, “I brake for butterflies.” He looks as if he might have played basketball, but baseball interested him as a youth. He even trained at the Atlanta Braves spring training camp, but when he found out baseball season interfered with turkey hunting season, he dropped his bat and left America’s pastime to pursue his true love.

His son is being raised with the same appreciation instilled in Turner as a child growing up in Atlanta. Turner’s first experiences with nature occurred at the Atlanta Country Club, when it was just a small, rural club. He and his brothers would run around the golf course fishing in the ponds and sometimes catching both fish and golf balls.

“We ran around outside to get the energy out,” Turner said. “I do the same thing with my son today. I just get him outside and run him around playing games.”

Turner looks to some of the country’s earliest environmentalists, such as John Muir, Teddy Roosevelt and Aldo Leopold. He talks about the philosophy of community and land in the style of Leopold, who said, “That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.”

“They say it takes a village, well, I’m just a part of that village,” Turner said. “We have just got to get kids outside, and I’ll do anything I can to facilitate that.”

Doing anything includes opening 900 acres adjacent to the youth center for the FWC’s Youth Hunting Program, which encourages landowners to share their land in order to preserve hunting traditions in Florida for future generations.

Turner credits the community surrounding the Florida youth center as the single most important factor in the success of the center. The rural communities of this country still provide a slower life, and Turner believes rural folks keep their word and enjoy a better way of life than those living in urban areas.

He challenges all landowners to do what he has done on whatever scale they can manage because Turner believes that not helping kids enjoy the outdoors will bring devastating results. Even if one farmer would invite one child out to the land to show him where food is grown, Turner adamantly claims a brighter future for today’s youth.

Turner spends a portion of his time on his family’s Florida 25,000-acre plantation, Avalon, adjacent to the youth conservation center. Here he has worked to bring back the native landscape by planting longleaf pines and wire grass and making a home for the red-cockaded woodpecker, species of special concern. His green eyes sparkle when discussing the longleaf and the red-cockaded woodpecker that makes its home in the pines.

“If I can get just one kid to plant a longleaf pine in his yard, then I’ve left something,” he said as he held out the slender long needle of a longleaf planted at the youth center. “This is a huge undertaking but it’s nurturing the land back to its original state and creating biodiversity once again in the environment.”

Just as Turner learned a deep love and appreciation for the outdoors as a child, he is instilling that love in his own child as well. But he hopes for more; he wants to show communities of children how to respect and love the land.

“It all begins with that first fish,” Turner said. “That’s where it began for me. I caught my first fish, a bream, at the age of 4. My dad helped me get the fish off the hook.

“Now you have to catch that second fish to continue, but it all begins with that first one.”