This story is part of our occasional series The Power of Moms: Stories of Intergenerational Influence and Climate Legacy.
There’s no set formula for making sure children grow up to be environmentalists. Still, immersing kids in a life hyper focused on clean air, clean water, and wide-ranging sustainability is a good bet. That’s how Laura Turner Seydel, an environmentalist known for her work with organizations that are solving the biggest existential threats facing humanity today, raised her three kids. It’s also how she was raised herself, as the daughter of media giant Ted Turner a.k.a. Captain Planet. Today, Laura’s grown children all work in the environmental realm, and her daughter Vasser Seydel is president of The Oxygen Project, a nonprofit aiming to protect nature through activism and storytelling.
Tell Congress: Hold the Line on Progress to Cut Air and Climate Pollution
“My ethic came from my parents and grandparents, who didn’t waste anything. They didn’t have all of this plastic or chemicals that were harmful. They didn’t have air conditioning. They composted everything,” Laura explains. She and her husband, Rutherford, intentionally included their young children in all aspects of their work, even places most people don’t bring kids.
The oldest was there in 1994 when both parents founded Chattahoochee Riverkeeper to help protect drinking water in Georgia, which Laura points out was the first of 12 waterkeepers in their home state. And they were front and center in 2004 as Laura co-founded Mothers and Others for Clean Air with a fellow mom concerned about what their children and others were breathing with a goal of improving air quality, especially for at-risk populations, in metro Atlanta.
“My husband and I were on the same page. We wanted clean air and water. Atlanta had egregious coal-fired power plants, and mayor after mayor kept kicking the ball down the field. We worked hard to solve for these issues,” Laura explains.
Laura’s children attended board meetings at various environmental organizations and learned firsthand about carbon footprint, safer building materials, eco-friendly appliances, and solar energy as they lived in the first LEED-certified gold house ever built. They also traveled far and wide, including on trips their grandfather Ted hosted for the family foundation. From Jordan to Japan, Vasser and her siblings went to “places where we could do deep dives into environmental and sustainability issues.”
“They were just raised in this situation. It was a total lifestyle immersion,” says Laura. For Vasser, growing up with parents actively living their values—not just for one issue or one organization, but all across the environmental spectrum, touching every aspect of their lives—was foundational. She loved all of it—even when her mother told waiters they would not get a tip if they brought a plastic straw to the table. “My mom was talking about plastic straws before it was cool… I think this is a great methodology for raising kids. You expose children to experiences and people and ideas, and it helps shape this amazing worldview,” Vasser says.
Most kids don’t have access to, say, United Nations Foundation trips (Laura is on the board), and this is not lost on Vasser. “I was lucky to grow up getting to know these amazing people, completely catalytic world changers. To be in their influence at a young age is life changing.” Vasser remembers feeling like a “sponge taking in all of this information” and is grateful for the experiences her parents made sure she had which shape her work today. There was a brief moment in college when Vasser wanted to learn about new things outside the overarching environmental narrative of her youth. “At the end of the day, I did keep coming back to the environment—a testament to my mom leading by example.” This was Vasser’s own choice: “There was never an expectation. It was always an invitation to come along,” she says.
The invitations have continued into adulthood—and sometimes Vasser now does the inviting. The family continues to collaborate on all things environment, turning to each other for advice and expertise to shape their work. They also try new things together that are “in alignment with how we want to live.” For a while, they were vegan as a family. They’ve explored consciousness and its modalities like meditation and breathwork in an effort to incorporate it into their activism. “It builds resilience in work that can be soul crushing. We are trying to build a new reality, one where climate change is at least limited, but we are skipping over the basic understanding that we have to love each other. People want to jump over that,” says Vasser.
Currently, mother and daughter are all in together on regenerative agriculture, one of The Oxygen Project’s current campaigns. “Simply put, regenerative agriculture is the upstream solution to a lot of our oceanic issues. Algae blooms and dead zones caused by runoff from industrial agriculture wreaks havoc on our waterways,” says Vasser. Her mother nods in response.
It was Vasser’s interest that piqued her mother’s interest—and deepened her understanding. “So many solutions are tied up in regenerative agriculture. I have made a commitment to focus on it. It helps with air quality and food security,” says Laura, who was already aware of the benefits of regenerative agriculture as a longtime board member of Project Drawdown, the climate solutions nonprofit, as well as from her father. “He had a lot of land and bison. He brought them back from the brink of extinction and rewilded them,” says Laura.
Even with this awareness, it was the time spent eating solely plant based as a family that helped Laura evolve her thinking and deepen her work on healthy soil, including advising and producing for the documentaries Kiss the Ground and the upcoming Common Ground. “My mom uses every different pie slice of her life to do what she can in our own time to move the ball forward,” says Vasser, with pride.
The pride is mutual. Watching Vasser—and her siblings—taking action as the climate crisis mounts makes Laura feel hope for the future. “It’s medicinal. It brings you away from the edge of falling into a doom and gloom scenario. It makes me really happy to see my kids—even though the wheels are coming off in so many different ways—have found their place in the world. They are working hard and they inspire others to do the same. It’s not over if we put our ideas and values into action.”
Tell Congress: Hold the Line on Progress to Cut Air and Climate Pollution