Wildlands Conservancy co-founder David Myers, who saved vast stretches of land from development, dies

David Myers, whose reverence for California’s natural beauty led him to co-found the Wildlands Conservancy and save hundreds of thousands of acres from development, including a patchwork of more than 500,000 acres in San Bernardino County — the largest purchase of land for preservation in the state — died on Monday at the age of 73.

The former executive director and most recent president of the Wildlands Conservancy, Myers died of natural causes at his home on the Oak Glen Preserve in the San Bernardino County mountains — on the land that he fought so hard to preserve, said Frazier Haney, the Wildlands Conservancy’s current executive director. In recent years, Myers had battled several health issues, including Parkinson’s disease, Haney said.

The Oak Glen, Calif.-based nonprofit, which he co-founded in 1995 with retired financier David Gelbaum, built a reputation as one of the most effective conservancies in the country with a unique vision that combines land stewardship with outdoors education for young people.

Myers also spearheaded the fight to create the 154,000-acre Sand to Snow National Monument, which extends from the Sonoran Desert floor up to over 10,000 feet in the San Bernardino National Forest, about 90 minutes east of Los Angeles.

“David Myers was an inspirational and tireless crusader for wild places,” said Peter Galvin, founder of the Center for Biological Diversity. “Anyone concerned with the health of majestic landscapes from Southern California’s Mojave Desert to Northern California’s Eel River, stands in his debt.”

“David also worked harder than anyone I know in the conservation movement,” he said, “to introduce low-income kids and their families to natural realms beyond their neighborhoods.”

A native Californian, Myers led his first conservation battle when he was a student of philosophy and literature at Cal State Fullerton in the 1970s. He was galvanized by a proposal to bulldoze the sycamores blanketing Chino Hills, where he grew up, to build an international airport.

“I just couldn’t believe it when I started seeing bulldozers tipping over oak trees,” Myers recalled in a 2000 interview with the Riverside Press-Enterprise. “And my thoughts at the time were, ‘What would people think about destroying their churches?’ Because they were destroying mine.”

Myers responded by helping organize a group called Hills for Everyone, which in 1977 won state approval to place 2,200 acres into the California State Parks system. Chino Hills State Park is now a 12,000-acre preserve that stretches from the Santa Ana Mountains to the Whittier Hills.

Myersdeveloped a love of nature as a boy during summer camping trips to Mammoth Lakes in the eastern Sierra. He also was influenced by the writings of John Muir, the legendary conservationist who founded the Sierra Club.

What had inspired him to follow in Muir’s path was the sudden realization that California’s natural beauty could be so easily destroyed.

“One winter he was looking down on a wetland in Chino Hills and about 10,000 Canada geese. The next year,” said Dan York, a close friend and a former associate director of the Wildlands Conservancy, “it was a parking lot for a mall. He realized then that it could all be gone in a generation.”

After college, Myers built furniture for a living but, according to York, “always had a remarkably sharp eye for real estate and land.”

In 1994, he decided to sell 640 acres of desert land he owned near Yucca Valley and apply most of the proceeds to conservation projects. He placed a newspaper ad seeking “a conservation-minded donor” who would buy the land but not develop it. Gelbaum, a mathematician who had made a fortune managing hedge funds, became his financial angel.

Together they began strategically buying up land to link the San Bernardino, San Jacinto and Big Horn Mountains with Joshua Tree National Park. Those purchases totaled 70 square miles.

The conservancy’s next big purchase was a 97,000-acre ranch in the foothills of the San Emigdio Mountains, northwest of Gorman, which once had been slated for a massive luxury home development. Renamed Wind Wolves, it is now the largest privately owned nature preserve on the West Coast, where endangered kit foxes and leopard lizards thrive along with elk, blacktail deer, great horned owls and bobcats. It also is home to marine fossils and Chumash paintings considered among the most impressive examples of Native American rock art.

Myers’ vision for the area included reintroducing animals that had once been native inhabitants, including tule elk and bighorn sheep, and obliterating man-made intrusions, such as a rock quarry, petroleum waste pits, fences and roads. He said the process would enable visitors the increasingly rare experience of looking “face-to-face at something that is truly wild.” He called it “rewilding” the land.

The conservancy’s crowning achievement was acquiring almost 1,000 square miles — about 580,000 acres — of desert land stretching from Barstow to Needles that had been owned by Catellus Development Corp., the real estate division of the Santa Fe Pacific railroad. Myers led the complex negotiations, finalizing the largest section of the deal in 2000 at a cost of $30 million in conservancy funds and $15 million from federal sources.

The acquisition kept the land out of the hands of a developer with plans to carve its spectacular rock ranges, lava flows, sand dunes, valleys and cactus gardens into 40-acre ranches. Myers and his team donated all the purchased land to the public, greatly expanding Joshua Tree National Park, the Mojave National Preserve and the Bureau of Land Management’s wildlands, which reconnected a massive corridor for wildlife.

“David was a man of courage, ambition and a boyish enthusiasm that was infectious,” Haney said. “He left us with a lot of big dreams and the tools needed to make them come true.”

Myers came up with the conservancy’s motto, “Behold the Beauty,” which Haney said captured the spirit of his longtime friend and mentor.

“David’s vision of conservation was one not simply based on science, but also based on the way that natural beauty can improve human lives ...[and is] a symbol of environmental health,” Haney said. He called him audacious, in the best way.

“I’ll never know another person like David,” he said. “I’ll miss that kind of reality-bending power that he had.”

The conservancy currently owns about 208,000 acres across California, Oregon and Utah — the vast majority in California — where the preserve system sees more than 1.4 million people each year. The group also provides free outdoor education on its lands, reaching more than 25,000 low-income students and families a year. The programs at Wind Wolves, Oak Glen, Whitewater and Mission Creek preserves in San Bernardino County have provided many of the children their first experience with the state’s natural wonders.

At Los Rios, the students hike on a nature trail designed by Myers with boulders etched with quotes from Emerson, Thoreau and Muir. He linked conservation with the nurturing of new generations of thinkers and naturalists and regarded outdoors education as a crucial strategy.

“We are showing these kids things that make their eyes grow wide, that make them say, ‘Oh, wow!’” Myers told The Times in 2003. “Isn’t that what the environment is all about?”

Myers is survived by his wife, two brothers, two sisters and many nieces and nephews.

Times staff writers Grace Toohey and Louis Sahagun contributed to this report. Woo is a former Times staff writer.