Turner’s anti-honey bee agenda sets off alarms

   Ted Turner, who gives more than $25 million annually to organizations
professing to have conservationist goals, announced in January 1999 that his
foundation was aligning itself with the Pollinator Conservation Consortium at
the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum.
   The organization was formed and is run by the authors of “The Forgotten
Pollinators.” The book calls honey bees conquerors and colonizers and a
serious threat to native pollinators, and implies strongly that beekeeping is
an environmentally destructive practice that should be discouraged and banned.
   The first product of this alliance hits the (US) airwaves March 21st with
“Pollinators in Peril,” hosted by Peter Fonda. Check your guide for local
listings.
   Writer Donovan Webster recounts his meeting with Turner and some of his
top managers in the January/February 1999 issue of Audubon magazine:
   “Finally, Turner speaks of his newest baby, which is being rolled out in
1999. It’s a pollinator project, which addresses the population drop of bees,
bats, butterflies, hummingbirds, and other animals that fertilize the fruit
and vegetable plants that constitute one-third of the world’s diet.
   Phillips (Mike Phillips, a top manager at the Turner Foundation) later
explains how the program started: “Ted was walking one day at Avalon, his
plantation in Florida, and he noticed there weren’t any bees.” At the next
Turner Foundation meeting in Atlanta, Turner pointed out his observation to
Phillips and Bahouth (Peter Bahouth, another official of the Turner
Foundation). Bahouth, as it happened, had recently read the book The
Forgotten Pollinators, by Stephen Buchmann and Gary Paul Nabhan, and had
already passed it along to Beau Turner (Turner’s son, who is a wildlife
biologist).
   Phillips says the book inspired Turner to take direct action on the issue
of native pollinators. “It’s one of our biggest pushes for 1999.”
   The article’s author sums up Turner’ conservation agenda: “Starting on his
own properties—more than a million acres on 13 different ranches and
plantations in North and South America....He wants to return his land, acre
by acre, species by species—to the way it was before white settlers arrived.”
   Turner has also turned loose a small army of biologists on his land to
monitor some of his pet peeves, one of which is “introduced bees” Again, from
Webster’s interview:
   “Don’t get me wrong, we’re not here to give every biologist in North
America a job,” Phillips says. “But we may need occasional help checking out
migratory populations, identifying threats, and testing how introduced bees
affect resident populations. Some of this can be gathered through a network,
and we’ve got folks at the Interior Department interested. We’re also hoping
other private landowners will look into these types of issues.”
   Turner’s efforts don’t end at the US border. He is active in South
America, where he has sustantial land holdings. Turner’s agenda also has a
lot of clout at the United Nations, which recently received a $1 billion gift
from the media mogul. The United Nations is helping—through the UN
Environmental Programme—formulate a global Convention on Biological
Diversity. Working documents from this group mention pollinators numerous
times as being threatened, with much of the science underpinning the
recommendations having been contributed by unnamed US researchers (more on
this later).
   The convention will recommend “legal instruments” and “incentive programs”
for treaty nations to enact internally to protect biodiversity.
John Mitchell