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."
