A Quiet Broker of the Wild

SAN EMIGDIO RANCH, Calif. —  The canyons, oaks and grasslands here sent Dave Myers back to his 1950s childhood.

“This reminds me so much of Orange County when I was young and the hills went on forever,” he said as his eyes roamed the landscape for deer and eagles.

The Orange County of Myers’ youth was long ago displaced by red-tile roofs. But his allegiance to the wild made him an ardent conservationist, head of a little-known nonprofit that has helped save expansive chunks of Southern California.

Operating out of a renovated bunkhouse in an old apple orchard in the foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains, his Wildlands Conservancy outmaneuvered the Mormon Church to buy San Emigdio Ranch, an untamed 97,000-acre intersection of ecosystems in southern Kern County, just over the mountains from the seeping sprawl of Los Angeles.

Then, in a series of transactions beginning in 1998, the organization came up with $35 million in private donations to help the U.S. Department of the Interior acquire a vast checkerboard of desert lands that together are bigger than Orange County. The Land Trust Alliance in Washington, D.C., says it is probably the biggest sale, in terms of acreage, of private land for public conservation in the U.S. The parcels stretch from Barstow to the Arizona border, a raw, khaki landscape of mountains, valleys and washes.

In its brief history, Wildlands Conservancy has demonstrated a talent for coaxing big private donations from a few wealthy benefactors and then using the money to attract public funds for major conservation purchases.

“It’s like something out of ‘The Godfather’--a deal you can’t resist,” quipped a congressional staffer familiar with the organization’s work.

Scott Eubanks, a realty specialist for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, remains incredulous at Wildlands Conservancy’s fund-raising muscle.

“It’s just phenomenal the ability they have to raise cash,” he said. “What they have done--I’m just amazed.”

The scale of their projects reflects a growing consensus in the conservation community that big is biologically better, that ecosystems need room to thrive.

Myers still has, at 50, the lope of a teenage boy. He recites Emerson and Wordsworth, never wears a watch and stopped eating meat and hunting years ago because, he said, “It no longer pleased my imagination to kill things.”

He and his small group--the administrative staff can be counted on one hand--don’t always succeed. Last year, they withdrew from attempts to protect the Owens Valley by buying development rights from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power after Inyo County ranchers and supervisors balked. Locals were suspicious of an outside environmental group as well as the concept of a conservation easement.

But Wildlands Conservancy very much got what it wanted in the Mojave Desert--in good part because the organization provided much of the funding, no strings attached.

While conservancy groups commonly negotiate land deals and provide money up front, they often are largely reimbursed by the government or another entity taking over the property.

Wildlands Conservancy poured a fortune into the Mojave purchase with no expectations of a payback. It could do so because its donors valued the boundless, unadorned essence of one of the most American of landscapes--the Southern California desert.

Though the group gets some foundation grants, much of its money comes from anonymous individuals interested in a particular project. As a nonprofit, the conservancy is not obligated to disclose the identity of major donors. And it doesn’t. Myers said in some cases he works through attorneys, signs confidentiality agreements and doesn’t know who the benefactors are. In other cases he does know, but the donors shun publicity.

“They want to pick and choose how they donate their money,” Myers explained. “They don’t want the world knocking on their front door. They don’t want the recognition associated with wealth.”

The Wildlands Conservancy staff, which includes a financial officer, outdoor education naturalists and a few preserve rangers, doesn’t much like the spotlight either.

“They just like to be in the background,” Eubanks said. “I don’t get the impression they’re trying to make a name for themselves.”

As vice president of Catellus Development Corp.--the owner of the desert land--John Bezzant for years has negotiated with Myers, whom he describes as “straightforward, humble, genuine. He doesn’t play games. He’s not manipulative.”

Myers grew up in La Habra, exploring the Chino Hills and spending part of his summers in the Sierra Nevada. When he was 17, he hiked the John Muir Trail. When he was 19, he ran a ranch in the Great Basin.

He studied botany, religion, psychology and literature in college, but never got a degree. “I just wanted to learn,” he said. “I wanted to learn how to deal with my despair about seeing all the places I loved destroyed.”

Then he started trying to save them. He formed a nonprofit to raise money for the creation of Chino Hills State Park, selling his house and woodworking business to get cash for the cause. He is uncomfortable discussing the amount, saying it was modest and that he was just one of several who made sacrifices for the park project.

Skilled at Bargaining

Believing material things can be a burden, he used to give away his possessions every two years. In 1995, he founded Wildlands Conservancy with four others, one of whom, David Gelbaum, remains on the board. Other current board members include Sierra Club director Carl Pope and Ed Hastey, retired director of the BLM in California.

It would be a mistake to dismiss Myers as a dreamy tree-hugger. Under his guidance, Wildlands Conservancy is intensely focused and skilled at bargaining with the big boys.

“They don’t let their emotions dictate their sense of what a good and bad deal is,” said Steven McCormick, who headed the Nature Conservancy in California for 16 years and is now that organization’s national president. The Nature Conservancy, probably the country’s best known land preservation group, helped Wildlands Conservancy in 1996 with the San Emigdio Ranch purchase, one of its first big deals.

A developer who planned a new town on part of the ranch had defaulted, and the oil company holding the note was well into sales talks with another potential buyer when Wildlands Conservancy appeared on the scene.

Group Outbid Mormon Church

Indeed, Farm Management Co. of Salt Lake City, an agriculture firm owned by the Mormon Church, thought it had the deal sewn up.

“We had a handshake and had begun title work,” said Farm Management President John Creer. “We had concluded it was something that would serve our purposes, and then it vaporized.”

After getting the ear of oil company executives with the help of the Nature Conservancy, Wildlands Conservancy outbid Farm Management and bought the property.

Myers’ group, which wanted the ranch for its ecological diversity, rich wildlife and common boundary with Los Padres National Forest, now operates it as a preserve called Wind Wolves.

There is still cattle grazing--to keep nonnative grasses from choking out wildflowers and native plants. But there also are a few score tule elk, introduced several years ago, scads of blacktailed deer, bobcats, golden eagles and busloads of Central Valley schoolchildren attending outdoor education programs.

In the future, the conservancy plans to open the preserve to the public on weekends for hiking, camping and wildlife watching.

The Mojave land deal has been far more complicated, stretching on for years in several phases, the third of which is due to close within months. The desert tracts are part of the land-grant legacy of the rail empires, alternating square-mile parcels given by the federal government to the railroads in the mid-1800s as enticements to lay tracks and promote settlement.

The BLM long had its eye on the hundreds of thousands of acres of railroad land scattered across its Mojave holdings like Swiss cheese holes. But, said Hastey, who joined the Wildlands Conservancy board after retiring, the agency couldn’t drum up enough money to buy the land. Nor did it have the kind of property that would have drawn Catellus into a major land swap.

In 1998, Catellus--a modern offshoot of the real estate arms of Southern Pacific and Santa Fe railroads--started marketing its desert property, sending shivers down the spines of environmentalists when it erected big “For Sale” signs on holdings within the newly created Mojave National Preserve, southeast of Baker.

Wildlands Conservancy, which had watched Catellus sell parcels for development near its Oak Glen headquarters, perked up. An anonymous donor offered millions. Wildlands Conservancy signed options with Catellus and sat down at the bargaining table. Other environmental groups lined up to lobby for federal funding.

When the third phase of the deal closes, the federal government will have acquired 505,000 acres of the Mojave that it gave away more than a century ago. Most is going to the BLM, the rest to the National Park Service. Catellus is getting $53 million for the land, $35 million of which came from donors to Wildlands Conservancy. The rest came from the federal government.

Additionally, Wildlands Conservancy gave the Department of the Interior 26,000 acres of private holdings it bought in Joshua Tree National Park and BLM wilderness areas. It helped the BLM with two land exchanges and recently obtained $6 million in donor pledges to fund a fourth phase of Catellus acquisitions, involving 77,000 acres in Imperial County.

All told, that’s nearly 1,000 square miles.

“A big project takes on a life of its own,” Myers said. “If you have a big vision, it really speaks to people’s hopes and dreams.”