K-State
Landon Lecture
by Ted Turner
media executive
Nov. 28, 2005
Thank
you Jon, Mr. President, for that generous introduction, and I am
definitely not the world's leading expert on bison. I'm perhaps
one of them. But there are people in the academic world that know
a lot more than I do about them.
But
I do know a lot and I've studied them a lot and I've studied a lot
of things a lot. In fact, it's why I love being around universities:
because I'm a student, and I just love learning.
I love
this planet. I really like just about everything about this world.
There are a couple of things that I'm not real fond of and you probably
know what they are. One of them is stupidity. And laziness. I don't
like lazy people that much and that's another great thing about
being around universities-there's no lazy people at universities.
Everybody's getting it done. And there's a lot to do.
I'm
going to try and make a fairly serious speech today because the
world situation is at a critical juncture as far as humanity is
concerned. For many years I underwrote Captain Cousteau's program
and I became a very close friend of his.
I was
with him on the Calypso up the Amazon. We were doing a six-hour
series on the Amazon, which was probably the most in-depth series
ever done on that magnificent part of our planet. It was right after
Ronald Reagan had been elected president and he had made his famous
statement that the Soviet Union was an evil empire. Where I come
from, when you call people derogatory terms it's an easy way to
get punched in the nose.
You
go into a bar in Kansas, I have a ranch here, in Medicine Bend,
and you say, 'I really don't like Kansas, I don't like the people
here, the ones I've met, I don't like the weather, and I just basically
don't like it at all.' Well you'll just get whacked right in the
nose. On the other hand, if you go into that same bar and you say,
'geez you know I've never been to Kansas before, this is a beautiful
place, the people are so friendly and nice, I just like everything
about it.' The people'd say, come over we'll buy you a beer.
So
basically, when you are looking for enemies on this planet, they
are easy to find, they're everywhere. All you've got to do is approach
them the way that I spoke of just a minute ago. On the other hand,
if you're trying to make friends on this planet, they're everywhere
too. In fact a lot of them are exactly the same people, it's just
the way you approach them.
If
you approach them and treat them with dignity, respect and friendliness.
That's what we all need to do in this world. We don't need to go
around starting wars with people, particularly when there's no good
reason to do so. I mean, I don't think that Iraq is better off today
than it was before we started the war. They're not producing as
much oil as they were before, because they're constantly blowing
up the oil fields and pipelines. More people are being killed today.
Saddam
Hussein may have killed a lot of people, but a lot of people are
being killed today and a lot of people were killed when we were
bombing and collateral fire and so forth, a lot of civilians are
dying over there. I believe we should have an intelligent, friendly
approach to life and the world and we all need to study the global
situation which I am now going to talk about and suggest some things
that need to be done.
One
good thing about our circumstances, if somebody asked me and I do
get asked, give us the bottom line of what you think the future
holds for say the next 50 years for the human race. And I say, well,
I like to liken it -- I was in baseball for quite a while -- I liken
it to a baseball game. I think humanity is the seventh inning, and
we're down by two runs.
Now,
that is not a hopeless situation by any manner of means, a serious,
but not hopeless. All we got to do is not let the other team put
any more runs on the scoreboard and we've got to score three runs
in the last two innings. A difficult job but certainly doable.
And
every one of our problems has a solution. And a solution that we
already know what the solution is pretty well. There still needs
to be some work done in some of the areas.
I've
listed seven major areas that we need to work on and work on immediately.
The first one, and I've tried to put them in order of importance,
but they're all important, they're all extremely important, and
we have to look at the solution to the predicaments that we're in
in a holistic way because if we don't really handle the whole thing
we're not going to have a very good outcome. It's just like our
bodies, you might have a great heart, but if you've got cancer,
what good is it? You're going to die anyway of cancer.
And
the first, and as I see it, the most dangerous thing, is the weapons
of mass destruction. Particularly nuclear. Nuclear, biological and
chemical weapons. We still have tens of thousands of nuclear weapons
in this world. The United States and the former Soviet Union, which
is now Russia, have I think around 10,000 each pointed at each other
on hair-trigger alert.
The
reason we don't pay much attention to it is because it's been that
way for the last 50 years. The cold war's been over for 12, 13,
14 years and our leaders can't figure how to get these weapons off
hair-trigger alert. That's why I started the nuclear threat initiative
with Sam Nunn because we've got to be concerned about these weapons.
If
something goes wrong, if there's an earthquake under the area where
the missiles are concentrated -- a lot of them are in Nebraska and
South Dakota, they're near here, not far away -- and of course a
lot of them are on submarines patrolling off the coast of the Russian
Republic, and they've got theirs same numbered or a few more pointed
at us than we have at them.
And
nobody, newspaper publisher right here, nobody anywhere in the world
is seriously talking about nuclear disarmament. They're talking
about getting the weapons off hair-trigger alert, which we haven't
been able to do. But if there's this earthquake up in Nebraska,
and the wires get crossed, and those weapons get launched accidentally.
Or
you have some nut, everyone here's seen Dr. Strangelove, remember
that Sterling Hayden character just flipped out. He lost precious
bodily fluids and decided he was going to launch the weapons without
authorization from the White House, and he did, if you'll recall.
Something like that could happen too.
You
have to question the judgment of our president on a lot of the decisions
that's he's made and it's our job to do that. He might just think
launching these nuclear weapons would be a good thing to do, he
thought attacking Iraq would. He doesn't have to get Congress to
approve it. All he has to do is push the button; he has the power
to do that.
And
the thing about these. Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, is there's
no fail-safe mechanism there. Once they're launched -- let's just
assumed that we launched them all because for whatever reason, and
the president Putin calls Bush on the phone and says, "we surrender
unconditionally, you don't I need to launch your nuclear weapons."
"Well, I'm sorry we I already launched them about a minute
ago." "Well how about recalling?" "There's no
way to recall them."
When
they've been launched they go hit their targets. They don't even
have a way to detonate them once they get into outerspace, it's
all over. So that's really dangerous because if there was a full-scale
nuclear exchange it's going to kill everybody on the planet. That's
what the scientists say with nuclear winter and all the radioactivity
that would be caused by the tens of thousands of nuclear weapons.
Why
don't we do something about that? We could do something about it
if we put somebody who demanded it be put on the agenda. The Russians
don't like the situation any better than we do, because they don't
want to die either.
Anyway,
that's the biggest problem, because in an afternoon it's the end
of the human race. And not just the human race, but the higher forms
of life. There might be a few cockroaches left after but there wouldn't
be any elephants and no rhinos and no whales, the things we love
and care so much about.
That
could be easily done, it would be very easy -- there are only eight
nuclear powers, they all sign a treaty agreeing to get rid of nuclear
weapons under IAEA supervision, and we could get rid of them over
a period of time. If was running the place, we would already be
rid of them, I can tell you that. I'm not, and I won't be, but there's
no reason why somebody else can't do it.
The
next biggest problem that we face, in my opinion, is climate change,
and environment, because they're one and the same. We have got to
move away from fossil fuels and stop putting CO2 into the atmosphere,
and we have to do that in an emergency situation like we did when
we mobilized for World War II. We need to put up windmills and solar
panels and bio-fuels, and possibly even expand nuclear power, again,
as much as I don't like that, but if we have to, I'd rather have
a nuclear plant than a coal-burning plant, in the circumstance we
have. We have got to get serious about saving our environment.
The
next thing that we've got do that is extremely important, is we've
got to get serious about family planning. We cannot keep piling
billions and billions more people into a finite world. When I was
born in 1938 there were slightly over 2 billion people on this planet.
Now there's close to six and a half billion, and if I live to be
85, which I'm hoping to do, at current rates we'll be at 8 billion
people.
In
85 years the population of this planet of human beings has quadrupled
while the number of gorillas has gone down by over 90 percent, the
number of elephants down by 90 percent, human beings has increased
by 800 percent.
We've
go to have smaller families. And I've got five children, okay, but
guess what -- they were born 40 years ago, and the population when
they were born was 3 billion. Half what it is today. But if I was
doing it over again I wouldn't have but one or two, as painful as
that would be. But I would do that because it's the only responsible
thing we that can do if we want to stay and live on this planet
at a decent standard of living.
The
next thing we've got to do, and this program is already under way
through the UN, is we've got to abolish poverty. Poverty is at the
root core, or one of the certainly major root causes, of the terrorism
that we're having all over the world. And there already is a program
under way at the UN to do just that under the Millennium goals.
We've
got to take better care of our water, and use less of it, conserve
it, because we're running out of fresh water all over the world.
And we also have to abolish hunger. In order to do these things
we need resources. We have the technology, what we need is the resources.
Where
are we going to get the resources? Well, the easiest and best place
is from the military budgets of the world. The world is now spending
about a billion dollars a year -- not a billion, sorry, a trillion.
You get billions and millions kind of mixed up. At least I did.
I thought I was worth millions but turned out I was worth billions,
then I lost it all again. It really doesn't make that much difference.
I've got to tell you, that's one of the things I've learned. At
least when you've lost it, it doesn't do any good to cry over spilt
milk.
Anyway,
so saying millions, billions, who cares...you know, makes it a little
easier to take. The military budgets is where the money is locked
up. Let me tell you, the military budgets are a big waste of time.
Military conquest is no longer a good way to do things. I would
have thought we would have learned that in Vietnam, because in Vietnam
we were fighting a third world country just like we're fighting
a third world country now in Iraq.
The
thing about it is, in the old days you'd send your troops in somewhere
and you would conquer the other country and they would surrender
and then the war was over. But that didn't happen Vietnam. And one
reason that it didn't happen I think, is because everyone's got
television in the world now, and nobody wants to surrender. It's
like losing the Super Bowl, except that in losing the Super Bowl
nobody dies.
These
people said 'we are going to have our independence, and we are not
going to be conquered by the United States unless they kill every
last one of us,' And we just finally got tired of it, although during
that war we lost about 50,000 casualties and the Vietnamese lost
3 million casualties. We killed with our bombs, our Napalm, our
Agent Orange, which we poured all over North and South Vietnam,
trying to kill all the plants. That was chemical warfare, incidentally.
The
United States, we talk about how great we are. During that war,
what was Agent Orange but chemical warfare? It absolutely was. It
was not only chemical war against the Vietnamese people, but against
Americans too because a lot of American boys had that stuff poured
on them while they were out in the jungle and they're having birth
defects and having all sorts of problems with cancer and so forth,
just like the Vietnamese people are. It just to me is unthinkable.
And
napalm. We were accused at least of dropping phosphorous, we said
we used it to light up a town at night, but a lot of it fell on
children, or some of it did, and some people say that we violated
the chemical warfare ban again.
Anyway,
the superpowers of tomorrow are not going to be the military powers
of today. They're going to be the countries that put their investment
into things like education, health care, science and technology
-- that's what's going to be on top in the future. Not who's got
the most bombs or tanks or rifles or grenades or cannons to blow
things up.
I mean
my god, it's hard enough to build things, can we imagine this beautiful
old town we're in right now if the American military decided for
some reason that they wanted to wipe it off the face of the earth?
They could do it in an hour, not even an hour, probably 30 minutes
if they got everything lined up properly, to have the bombers come
over and blow the whole little place off the face of the earth.
Is that what we want to do, is that the kind of humanity, are we
going to be like the jerk who came into the bar in Kansas and said,
'I don't like anybody in here, and what's more I'm going to bomb
the place too to prove I don't like it, I'm gonna blow you off the
face of the earth.
If
you don't do what I'm telling you to do, I'm just going to kill
every god damn last one of you, you know? Your children, your grandparents,
your hospitals, your schools, we're going to blow up everything.
That's what we're going to do.'
In
fact, if that's the way we're going to be, if that's the way we're
going to act, we really don't deserve to live, and the sooner we
commit suicide, which we're headed towards now, the better the world
would be without us.
The
thing I don't like to see is taking the elephants, the chimpanzees,
and the gorillas with us when they're totally innocent. No gorilla
ever bombed anybody and there's only about, 1,000 of them left in
the world. 6.3 billion people and 1,000 gorillas. Does that sound
right or fair to you?
People
ask me why I care about the environment. I'm trying to bring back
prairie dogs. I've got a 100,000 prairie dogs approximately on my
different ranches. Keith, how many have we got here? We've got about
10,000 here in Kansas. I'll bet you we've got more prairie dogs
than anybody else in Kansas. Anybody here got more than 10,000 prairie
dogs on their ranch? I don't see a single soul.
So
we're number one in prairie dogs, by god, and it's something, because
prairie dogs are in a lot of danger, on a small scale because they're
just little things. They are in about the same spot the bison were.
There were billions out here and now there's only a million or two
left which is one-thousandth as many as there were back when the
white man first came out here.
So
really what I'm calling for is a basic change in human behavior.
But basically it's not anything different than your learning here
at the university, because what the university is trying to do is
teach us that we should be as good as we possibly can and that we
should live up to our potential, that we should be working to make
our own lives better and those of the people and all the other little
critters around us better as well.
That
we should be the best that we can, not the worst that we can. And
what does it require? It's just education. That's why my ex-wife,
Jane Fonda, said 'Why do you go get those honorary degrees? Every
spring you go to three or four colleges and get an honorary degree.
Why do you do that?' I said, 'Well, I don't get that many.' I'm
not getting an honorary degree today and I'm here.
I'm
here because I was invited. I said, 'first of all I'm a business
man and I think it's really important that business needs to stay
very close and be very supportive and have as much interplay as
possible with the educational community.' Because in order for our
country and our world to be successful we need business and we need
education. And we need them to work and pull together for the betterment
of our society.
And
what we need for everybody in this room and everybody around this
world -- this is not going to be a thing where it's us or them…it's
going to be all of us together.
I'm
on my way next week to Bangladesh and India and Pakistan with this
same message. I just got back from Russia and Kazakhstan and North
and South Korea with the same message, that we are going to survive
together or we're going to perish together.
And
all we need to do is do the right things and stop doing the wrong
things. And if we do that we're going to be just fine.
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