Rhett Turner on Walking the Line Between Wild and Civilized

On a cool South Georgia morning at Nonami Plantation, Rhett Turner stops the mule wagon and walks away from the pointers and the pines to a nearby tombstone in the middle distance. The stone belongs to Deacon William C. Ellis, Jr., a dog trainer Rhett never met. A sculpted Labrador retriever, head lowered and gaze fixed on some unseen horizon, keeps watch over the grave.

“It’s a pretty cool tombstone,” Turner says. “He loved dogs. Everybody talked about what a good trainer he was. I thought, ‘We need to stop and look at this.’”

In that small act—a pause to honor a man whose work helped shape this landscape—lies much of who Rhett Turner is: a documentary filmmaker, conservationist and lifelong outdoorsman standing at the crossroads of Southern history, wild land and a powerful family legacy. He is also the son of Ted Turner, the late media titan whose passing has prompted a fresh look at what exactly the Turner name stands for in the American South.

From Parade Ground to Darkroom

Rhett Turner’s life bridges two unlikely worlds. He spent his college years first at The Citadel, the storied military college in South Carolina, and later at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). The Citadel gave him structure. He can still recall the honor code (“a cadet does not lie, cheat or steal, not tolerate those who do”), as more than words on a plaque. It was lived every day in the pressure cooker of the plebe year.

Reflecting, he notes “You make incredible friends of a lifetime. The structure, the honesty, the loyalty, the starting on time, being organized.” He continues, “You may not remember every class, but you remember the camaraderie and that shapes you.”

If The Citadel was an inheritance (his father effectively chose it for him), RISD was all his own. There Turner traded barracks for studios, dress uniforms for cameras, and found the language that would carry him through the rest of his working life in photography and film. A three-year undergraduate program in Providence immersed him in visual storytelling and gave him tools to translate his fascination with landscapes and wildlife into moving and still images.

At The Front Lines of History

After college, Turner landed at CNN, joining what was still a relatively young experiment in 24-hour news. Stationed in Tokyo for three years, he traveled across Asia and beyond, often to places the rest of the world was just watching on a television screen. During the Gulf War, he was dispatched to Jordan, then on to Baghdad in 1991. When the war ended, he flew not back to Tokyo but to Moscow, just as the Soviet Union was collapsing.

He and his father had been there in 1986 for the Goodwill Games and saw the hammer-and-sickle flag flying over Red Square. In 1991, Rhett stood in that same square and saw the Russian Federation tricolor take its place. “I’ve seen both flags fly over Red Square. You don’t forget that.”

He would return to Russia multiple times, including on a documentary about nuclear and biological weapons (Avoiding Armageddon, 2003) that brought him near the facilities where chemical weapons and smallpox are still stored under joint US-Russian agreements—a stark reminder of the fragile line between control and catastrophe.

A Childhood Spent Outdoors

For all the global drama he has witnessed, Turner’s center of gravity remains closer to home. He grew up in a family where “we either worked or recreated outside.” There was sailing at Lake Allatoona, road trips to regattas, then a spot on The Citadel sailing team. There were guns, learned carefully and respectfully. There was hunting and fishing on the Chattahoochee River and on family lands throughout the South.

Formal conservation language came later, as his father’s wealth and holdings grew, and with them the scope of his philanthropy. Today Rhett serves as a director and board member of the Turner Foundation, helping steer funds to environmental causes across the region and beyond. But the roots of that work trace back to childhood days when being indoors was the exception, not the rule.

Nonami: A Wild Quail Holdout

Although Turner did not grow up going to Nonami, the plantation has become a touchstone for him. His father acquired the property in 2010. Sixteen years later, Rhett speaks of the place with the easy familiarity of a man who has walked its courses in every sort of weather.

Unlike many commercial operations, Nonami’s quail are entirely wild. There are no pen-raised “put birds” released ahead of guests. Maintaining that standard requires rigorous habitat management and a refusal to compromise. Ray Pierce, the plantation manager, oversees burning, planting and countless details that most guests never see. In a region increasingly carved up for development, properties like Nonami have become unexpected arks for the remnants of the longleaf pine ecosystem—once 90 million contiguous acres stretching across the Southeast, now reduced to a fraction of its former expanse.

Turner explored that ecosystem in his film, Secrets of the Longleaf Pine (2015), which highlights the astonishing biodiversity of these forests: 60 to 80 plant species in a single square yard of ground, more than the Amazon in that same space. “We don’t really know what the coastal plain of the Southeast is supposed to look like,” he says, noting centuries of conversion to farmland and mixed forests. “We’ve let most of it go,” he adds wistfully.

Filming a Vanishing World

Secrets of the Longleaf Pine is one of several projects through which Turner has tried to connect audiences with landscapes they may ever see and species they might never otherwise know. In Georgia from the Air (2019), he deployed drones to show his home state from above, stitching together mountains, cities and barrier islands into an aerial portrait. In Journey of the Whooping Crane (2018), he chronicled the precarious recovery of North America’s tallest and rarest crane species, from the brink of extinction in the 1950’s.

Each project grows not merely out of issues, but out of relationships with scientists, landowners, and fellow conservationists he has built over years. He is currently at work producing a public television series on Mexican gray wolves, bison and beavers, with a collaborator based in Connecticut. His research travels take him to Montana to film newborn bison calves, at a time when the future of wild bison on public lands is the subject of heated national debate. Turner sees these animals as more than subjects; they are symbols of the vast self-willed systems North America once hosted, and which now survive only in scattered holds.

A Life Recorded, One Walk at a Time

For all his film work, some of Turner’s most intimate documentation happens on paper. Two years ago, after buying a hunting property in Arkansas, he began keeping a handwritten hunting journal. At first he intended it only for that place. But then came the last hunt with his son on a family property in South Carolina that the family has owned for 45 years. Soon, every hunt was going in that same book. Each spread pairs a scanned photograph from the day, alongside Turner’s handwritten notes. He confesses that he wishes he’d started this practice earlier.

His hunting is powered by a simple metric: walking 1,000 miles a year on foot. It’s a personal goal he has kept since 2013. A morning quail hunt at Nonami often means seven miles of brisk walking, keeping pace with the horses, mules and dogs over three hours. There were years that he did that morning and afternoon, but even now, walking only on the morning hunt (afternoon on horseback), the distance adds up.

In His Father’s Footsteps and Beyond

The shadow and shelter of Ted Turner hangs gently over his son’s work. Friends and strangers alike know the elder Turner as the man who required global media, then turned much of that energy and fortune toward land conservation, species reintroduction and nuclear nonproliferation. In death, he may be remembered as much for the ranches, forests and grasslands he protected as for any headline he ever ran.

Rhett remembers a father who “just loved being out,” whether quail hunting, fishing or sailing. In later decades, Ted Turner gradually traded 24-hour news for 24-hour landscapes, making a quiet plea for turning off the screens and going outside. He did this by example if not by speech.

One of Ted’s final wishes was to be cremated, with his ashes scattered across the properties he spent his life assembling and restoring. That wish ties father and son, land and legacy. It suggests that for this family, the real inheritance isn’t merely wealth or fame; it is place. It is the feel of a November wind in the longleaf pines, the whistle of wild quail flushing just ahead of the dogs, the silent witness of a stone dog at a trainer’s grave.

Rhett Turner looks at the modern South with a mix of affection and alarm. He worries about a restless demand for more that’s chewing up the woods on the edge of his home base of Atlanta, for another sports field or subdivision. He remarks that he’s seen coyotes loping through Buckhead, displaced by bulldozers.

Yet in places like Nonami, in the careful restoration of longleaf, in a dog working a covey on a crisp morning, he also sees what’s still possible. His work—on foot, behind the camera, and in the boardroom—suggests an answer to a question the South must urgently ask itself: how much is enough and what are we willing to preserve before it is gone?