Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay’s founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives, and story summaries.
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 and birthing the Mojave Trails National Monument — a rare reversal of fortune for the American desert.
Unlike many conservationists, Myers was uninterested in wilderness as museum piece. His preserves welcomed the public — hikers, schoolchildren, anyone willing to marvel. “Behold the beauty,” he urged, not as poetic flourish but as imperative. Preserving wild lands was not just for the sake of species or scenery, but because, properly stewarded, they made life better.
By the time of his death, his Wildlands Conservancy had helped protect over 2.3 million acres. It was a developer’s tally — only the outcome was nature, not concrete.
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