Each year tens of thousands of species and attendant ecological actions, fine-tuned by time and place, disappear at the hand of man. These losses strip away the redundancy and certainty of nature and diminish the lives of millions of people. If these trends continue, the world will become a dismal place indeed, with silent springs and hot summers and little left to excite the senses except the weeds. Without doubt, the extinction crisis looms as one of humanity’s most pressing problems.

In response to the crisis, Mr. Ted Turner and his family launched in June 1997 the Turner Endangered Species Fund. This private, non-profit charity dedicates itself to conserving biodiversity by ensuring the persistence of imperiled species and their habitats. We at the Turner Endangered Species Fund concentrate our efforts on carnivores, grasslands, plant-pollinator complexes, and species that historically ranged onto properties owned by Ted Turner. Our activities rest upon the principles of conservation biology. We support the distribution of reliable scientific and policy information on biodiversity conservation. (TESF publications and presentations)

We work closely with state and federal agencies, universities, and private organizations. We operate on the belief that many minds wrapped around a problem builds a certain route to success. Whether we endeavor to manage an existing population or restore an extinct one, our goal is population persistence with little or no human intervention. We believe that self-sustaining populations of native species indicate a landscape that is healthy or at least recovering.

It clearly will take much work to establish the Turner Endangered Species Fund as an effective force in conservation. This work will be difficult because private stewardship of biodiversity is new, the problems are complex, and effective solutions require broad-based biological, sociopolitical, geographic, and fiscal considerations. Many of our projects will be controversial, slow to succeed, and fraught with uncertainty, and some may fail. The difficulty will come not because we were ill prepared or because we did not work hard but because restoration is an imprecise process about which scientists as yet know little. But this will not diminish our substantial resolve. We believe that real solutions to the extinction crisis will come through the genius and determination of mankind. We intend to contribute by establishing a new measure for conserving the wondrous diversity of life on Earth.