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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.”

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.

“One winter he was looking down on a wetland in Chino Hills and about 10,000 Canada geese. The next year,” said Dan York, a close friend and associate director of the Wildlands Conservancy, “it was a parking lot for a mall. He realized then that it could all be gone in a generation.”

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.