By Chris Kornelis

When David Myers would walk home from school as a child, he'd often take a detour to explore a gully filled with lizards, frogs and snakes. One day he saw bulldozers filling in the gully, so he grabbed as many lizards as he could and brought them to the screened-in porch of the family's home in Orange County in California.

It was an early glimpse of who Myers would eventually become: a conservationist on a scale that has few rivals.

In his 20s, Myers lived in a Volkswagen camper van and led a campaign to convince the state of California to acquire thousands of acres for what is now Chino Hills State Park. In his 30s, he lived near Joshua Tree National Park, where he and his brother bought thousands of acres that they sold off in parcels to buyers who would agree to protect them. In his 40s, he co-founded the Wildlands Conservancy with David Gelbaum, a former hedge-fund manager with pockets deep enough to finance Myers's vision.

And before he turned 50, he embarked on what was reported to be the biggest land acquisition in California history, and estimated to be the biggest purchase of private land, by acreage, for public conservation in U.S. history. In a series of transactions, Wildlands acquired more than half a million acres in the Mojave Desert and donated them to the Interior Department. Much of the land is now the Mojave Trails National Monument.

"At heart," he wrote in an unpublished memoir, "I am still following the instincts that guided that distraught little boy who turned his father's patio into his first nature preserve."

'A developer on our side'

He didn't act like a distraught little boy. Joan Taylor, a longtime activist with the Sierra Club, said he approached land preservation with the business savvy, negotiation skills and singleness of mind that she was accustomed to seeing for the people she often sat across the table from: developers.

"He was like a developer on our side," she said, "developing landscapes to be preserved forever."

Between its founding in 1995 and Myers's death, on March 10 at the age of 73 of natural causes, the Wildlands Conservancy helped protect more than 2.3 million acres of land -- an area larger than Delaware -- through acquisitions and lobbying for protective measures like national-monument status. The organization currently owns and manages more than 200,000 acres across 25 nature preserves, including the 93,000-acre Wind Wolves Preserve outside Bakersfield, Calif., the largest nonprofit nature reservation on the West coast.

A central part of the preserve system's mission is to create programming to introduce the wilderness to children who don't otherwise have the means or access. Myers's brother, Greg, said it was his way of giving them a chance to fall in love with the outdoors the way he did.

Lost in exploration

Born on Feb. 7, 1952, and raised in La Habra, Calif., Myers grew up camping with his family at Mammoth Lakes, exploring Joshua Tree National Park, and could lose himself for hours exploring near his home.

"So enthralled was I, romping the creek banks exploring the workings of nature," he wrote later, "that remembering to get home for dinner on time required a constant scolding."

In addition to his brother, Greg, Myers's survivors include his wife, another brother and two sisters.

Pete Dangermond, former director of California State Parks, said that Myers was unique in that much of the land he protected wasn't in immediate threat of being developed, but might be years or decades in the future. In this way, he said Myers was looking generations ahead, as Theodore Roosevelt challenged California to do in his famous 1903 speech in Sacramento, when he called on the state to preserve its giant Sequoias -- "a temple built by no hand of man" -- and manage its forests in ways that benefit the present generation, but also that "our children and our children's children shall get the benefit."

"Doing things that way out front," Dangermond said, "is really answering that call."

Write to Chris Kornelis at chris.kornelis@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 21, 2025 10:00 ET (14:00 GMT)

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