There was something almost subversive about David Myers’s approach to conservation. He spoke the language of developers, negotiated like one, and sometimes even thought like one — but his ambitions ran in the opposite direction. Where others saw empty land as opportunity for subdivisions or shopping malls, he saw the scaffolding of nature itself: canyons, deserts, mountains that demanded safeguarding long before anyone thought to destroy them. Born in 1952 in La Habra, California, he discovered early that land could vanish. A childhood gully teeming with lizards was flattened by bulldozers before his eyes. He gathered what creatures he could, carting them home in a futile, formative rescue mission. He would spend the rest of his life trying to prevent such losses, but on a vastly larger scale. In his youth, he lived simply — camping, building furniture — but always kept one eye on real estate. Chino Hills, near where he grew up, was slated for an international airport. Instead, thanks to his efforts, it became a state park. He repeated the trick many times over, culminating in the founding of the Wildlands Conservancy in 1995 with financier David Gelbaum. Together, they engineered land deals on a scale more often measured in mining rights or ranching empires. His most audacious play came in the Mojave Desert, where he orchestrated the acquisition of more than half a million acres from a railroad spinoff. Developers had plans. Myers had other ideas. The land was transferred to public ownership, expanding national parks…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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