51�Թ�

Much of the unincorporated areas — which make up over 65% of the county and include Altadena, the outskirts of Santa Clarita and Palmdale areas and Puente Hills near Whittier — are wildlands or exist at the wildland-urban interface, which are more prone to fire.

“We have been sprawling into the wildlands for the last 75-plus years with very little consideration of the impacts.”

Myers and his team donated all the purchased land to the public, greatly expanding Joshua Tree National Park, the Mojave National Preserve and the Bureau of Land Management’s wildlands, which reconnected a massive corridor for wildlife.

David Myers, whose reverence for California’s natural beauty led him to co-found the Wildlands Conservancy and save hundreds of thousands of acres from development, including a patchwork of 400,000 acres in San Bernardino County — the largest purchase of land for preservation in the state — died on Monday at the age of 73.

The former executive director and most recent president of the Wildlands Conservancy, Myers died of natural causes at his home on the Oak Glen Preserve in the San Bernardino County mountains — on the land that he fought so hard to preserve, said Frazier Haney, the Wildlands Conservancy’s current executive director.