Clifford Stoll: 18 minutes with an agile mind

"I wasn't losing, I was learning how to win"

Recently CNN was interviewing Ted Turner and they asked Ted how he kept going when his sailing team lost year after year and his baseball team was in last place for four years before going on to win the World Series. Without any hesitation Ted said, “I wasn’t losing, I was learning how to win.”

Turner Endangered Species Fund Saves Species and Habitats

The Turner Endangered Species Fund protects imperiled species and habitats on over 1.8 million acres owned by the Turner family. Turner properties are also home to more than 25,000 bison.

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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.

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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.

Visit Turner Endangered Species Fund to find out more information.

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I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor. - Henry David Thoreau

Man Who Lived in Arizona Cave Expelled

Here is a news story from a few years ago. It reminded me of a story that a friend of mine told me once upon a time. He worked on Ted Turner's Vermejo Park Ranch, it is located in New Mexico and it was so huge that they found a guy living on the property and he thought he was living on public land. He had no idea that what seemed like the wide open spaces and wildness was private property. I mean it is 588,000-acres and so they sent him on his way with no trouble but he had a teepee and everything set up and thought he was the mountain man. I felt bad for the guy to think that he wanted to be away from the madness of cities and all and yet he couldn't get away from the control.

Well here is the news brief from a few years ago about another man...


A man was evicted from a cave he had lived in for 11 years after pleading guilty to using a national forest for residential purposes.

Thomas J. Crawford had a bed, books and clothes arranged on hangers, along with pots and cutlery for cooking in his cave in the Coconino National Forest in northern Arizona.
He was arrested Friday after a Flagstaff resident reported a suspicious camp.

Crawford pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court on Monday and was sentenced to one year of probation and banned from the forest.

He told Forest Service officials he would come to Flagstaff every week or so to get supplies and water. Sometimes, he would work here.

Crawford, accompanied by Forest Service officials and a reporter from the Arizona Daily Sun, was allowed to remove his possessions after he was released from jail Tuesday.

"As you can see, I don't have a TV or anything," he said. "I've got the sky, the wind, the rain, the canyon wrens. ... This is a beautiful mountain. You could explore it a lifetime."