A Debt to a Ten-Year-Old's Dream

It is worthy of noting that one of my heroes is nothing other than a billionaire — a man who had a dream as a ten-year-old of rebuilding the American high prairies by adding buffalo back into the equation. This man was nothing other than Ted Turner — and my admiration holds.

He is, at present, the largest private bison steward on the continent, and he has done more to demonstrate that the herd can be brought back at scale than any agency or committee. The critique of concentrated capital that runs through this book is real, and it stands. But the critique is instrumental, not moral: it is about how affection for a place is expressed, not about who is allowed to love it. When capital is bent to a pulsed, rotational, native-species rhythm — when it is used to return the buffalo to the ground it evolved with — it becomes exactly the kind of self-limiting instrument the argument has been asking for. Credit is owed where credit is owed. A ten-year-old boy held a dream about the prairie, kept it his whole life, and put his fortune under it. That is the shape the correction can take. [2]