Laura Turner Seydel – Environmental Advocate
LAURA TURNER SEYDEL is the firstborn daughter of American entrepreneur, businessman, and founder of CNN and TBS, Ted Turner. Celebrated for the many philanthropies he has founded and supported over the years, Laura attributes her own passion for environmental health and conservation issues to her father, who raised his five children to be benevolent and aware of the world around them. “It’s in my DNA,” Laura says. Married and the mother of three, she serves as chair for the Captain Planet Foundation, founded by Ted Turner and Barbara Pyle in 1991 and named after the cartoon show, Captain Planet and the Planeteers, which they produced between 1990 and 1996. Today the foundation is a 501c3 public charity that has grown into a worldwide network of young people who strategize, connect, and strive to make a meaningful difference locally and globally to save threatened and endangered species, and ecosystems. Laura is cofounder with her husband, Rutherford, of the Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, which they established in 1994 to monitor and ensure the purity of the waters of the Chattahoochee River Basin, Georgia’s most heavily used water source, and is among many philanthropies that Laura dedicates her time and financial resources.
Tell me about your brothers and sister?
I have three brothers and one sister. I am the oldest child, my sister is seven years younger and the last child, so we are the bookends in our immediate family. My siblings Teddy, Rhett, Beau, and Jennie all work on environmental issues. Teddy is a world class sailor. He spends a lot of time on the ocean and has been involved with getting at-risk youth to learn about healthy marine systems. Rhett is a documentary filmmaker and photographer and has made many nature documentaries focused on Sandhill cranes, the Chattahoochee River, and other important topics. He has a coffee table book of pictures of wild landscapes, soon to be released. Beau works with my dad, dedicating most of his time to managing wildlife for conservation and running his properties in the Southeast. One of his passions is getting inner city kids into nature by teaching them how to hunt and fish. I believe it is important for our youth to have a connection to nature. Fishing and hunting are one way to educate and expose them to the outdoors. My sister, Jennie, has had her own television program for eleven years, on PBS. EcoSense for Living is seen in approximately 90 markets across the country. The stories spotlighted in EcoSense for Living are all positive and inspiring. Jennie does not present a doom and gloom perspective but rather a factual accounting of what is happening and suggestions on how you can help. My brothers and sister are doing amazing work.
Your family is collectively focused on the environment. How has your father, Ted Turner, maintained strong family connectivity around issues to which he has dedicated his life?
My dad started family gatherings around his philanthropic initiatives over thirty years ago. He wanted to make sure that our family members would get together a couple of times a year, primarily during Christmas holidays, where he combines the gathering with foundation meetings. We do a second, big trip in the summer, an environmental retreat, and bring our children. The fourteen cousins have all built a great bond over those years and remain very close to this day. I think the number one reason he started this beautiful tradition was to bring the family together. It also taught us to work together, to learn about and become quasi experts in the environmental causes that are most interesting to us. The foundation we had was much larger initially because we had Time Warner stock. After the merger with AOL, the value of the stock dropped and so did the value of the Corpus, so we have less funds to grant. But we also are much better at putting that money to work, to achieve our goals.
