David Myers, the most dynamic of San Bernardino County’s conservationists of the current or preceding generations, has died.
Born in La Habra, not too distant from the southwesternmost extension of San Bernardino County, in 1952, his family relocated to Chino Hills when he was a toddler. He ambled and sometimes rode horses among the wildlands around his home, with its Oak Trees, fields full of lizards, horned toads and tree frogs, as well as its streams, rivulets and rills, filled with crawdads, frogs and snails in the late 1950s and early 1960s, while it was still an unincorporated county area consisting primarily of agricultural uses.
As Orange County was expanding by leaps and bounds and undeveloped land there was being sold off to developers, yielding for its owners a tremendous profit, be watched the earth movers, Caterpillars, earthscrapers and bulldozers eliminate the elements of nature he loved. It registered with him that the Canadian geese and arctic gulls that flew south every fall and wintered in Chino Hills would one day lose their destination, if that developmental frenzy continued it eastward progression. On occasion, during summer vacations, he was removed entirely from Southern California and the encroachment of civilization on nature, when he vacationed with his family in the Sierra Nevadas. At 17, he hiked the John Muir Trail.
In 1970, he began studying for a college degree in liberal arts at Cal State Fullerton, taking botany, religion, psychology and literature classes. In the summer of 1971, he managed a ranch in the Great Basin
While in college, he was alarmed to learn that a plan was afoot to establish an international airport in Pipes Canyon, between Yucca Valley to the east and the San Bernardino Mountains to the west. Networking with others, his group arranged to purchase property that they felt would be crucial to the airport development project, and the airport was never seriously pursed.
He did not graduate from college, becoming a carpenter who took pride in delivering high quality furniture to his customers. He never lost his interest in preserving nature, wherever he could.
Despite despising the manner in which real estate developers utilized the leverage of their wealth or access to financing to overwhelm landowners to purchase property at as low of a price as possible before obtaining an entitlement to build on it or get zoning alterations to maximize its value when it was developed, Myers learned from them and adopted their tactics, recognizing that he could purchase property that lay in the footprint of where those intent on building were going to place their next project. He would acquire some of that acreage and then bargain with the developers, getting top dollar for it and then using that money to purchase wildland acreage he and his cohorts were determined to save from development into perpetuity.
In 1977, Myers and his associates set their sights on preserving a substantial swath of property stretching from Chino Hill to the Whittier Hills from development. In 1978, they formed Hills For Everyone, and over the next four years, used whatever means they could to get the state to set aside first 2,200 acres and then gradually even more land for a State Park. One of the issues Hills For Everyone used was that the land was being contemplated for use as an international airport. That represented the second time Myers used resident resistance to an international airport to carry off a major natural setting preservation program. Ultimately, Chino Hills State Park, now consisting of a 12,000-acre preserve, has been welcomed into the California State Parks system, including portions of both the Santa Ana Mountains to the Whittier Hills.
Myers continued with the strategy of purchasing remotely located land, property that had never been developed and was not near existing utilities or infrastructure and therefore not immediately inexpensively developed. This made the land inexpensive and he would purchase it in large lots at bargain basement prices.
In 1994, Myers sold a full square mile – 640 acres – of land he owned near Yucca Valley to create a fund to engage in the purchasing or tying up of other land he intended to bar from being developed into perpetuity. He sought out, through newspaper and magazine ads “a conservation-minded donor” who was ready to join with him in purchasing land to be dedicated to remaining pristine. In 1995, financier David Gelbaum, a financial genius had made billions through the management of hedge funds on Wall Street, responded, ready to throw in 500 dollars to the cause for every dollar Myers was willing to put up.
The duo founded the Wildlands Conservancy and embarked on land deal after land deal that extended to over 2.3 million acres. They began making strategically placed and timed purchases of property, including 70 square miles in the San Bernardino, San Jacinto and Big Horn Mountains inside and outside what is now Joshua Tree National Park.
They networked with other conservation-minded giants, such as then-Senator Dianne Feinstein.
The Wildlands Conservancy thereafter went north, moving out of Southern California into the southern Central California, purchasing a 97,000-acre cattle ranch in the foothills of the San Emigdio Mountains, northwest of Gorman, “rescuing” that property from being developed into a massive residential subdivision featuring pockets of commercial development. Gelbaum and Myers restyled it into the 151.560-square mile Wind Wolves, Nature Preserve, the largest privately owned preserve on the West Coast, a habitat for kit foxes, salamanders, tule elk, bighorn sheep, blacktail deer, bobcats, skunks, raccoons, California condors, great horned owls and leopard lizards.
In what were the Wildlands Conservancy’s two greatest coups, masterminded by Myers and bankrolled by Gelbaum with some help from the federal government, substantial portions of the Mojave and the Upper Sonoran deserts were preserved for future generations.
The conservancy in 2000 acquired 906.25 square miles — 580,000 acres — of the Mojave Desert extending from Barstow in the west to Needles on the east owned by Catellus Development Corporation, the real estate arm the Santa Fe Pacific railroad. Myers convinced the railroad to let go of the property in exchange for $45 million – $30 million in cash supplied by Gelbaum and another $15 million from the federal government.
Myers was also the prime mover in the creation of the 54,000-acre Sand to Snow National Monument, which is located in San Bernardino’s Mojave Desert and well as in the Colorado Desert, which is the northernmost part of the larger Sonoran Desert which spans California, and Baja California, straddling the United States and Mexico.
Those acquisitions thwarted the designs developers had on the land, preserving diverse montane and desert habitats and some of the most spectacular rock ranges, lava flows, sand dunes, valleys and cactus gardens in the Southwest. The Wildlands Conservancy donated the land to the public, which created the Sand to Snow National Monument and expanded Joshua Tree National Park, the Mojave National Preserve and the Bureau of Land Management’s wildlands, which reconnected a massive corridor for wildlife.
According to another conservationist, Rhett Ayers Butler, “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.”