Norman Myers
- Born
- 24 August 1934
Myers grew up on a sheep farm in the Pennines with no electricity or gas until the age of 11. As a child, Myers said he didn’t care for the farm or nature and hadn’t heard of the word ‘environment’. He read a lot of adventure books including Tarzan and this inspired him to go to Africa when he graduated.
His first career was as a colonial administrator in Kenya in 1958, where he worked with tribal elders and chiefs to decide how money should be spent. He was involved in setting up a number of national parks in the Masai Mara. After Kenya became independent, he decided to stay in the country and worked as a teacher and photographer. He spent his holidays in the parks and this was where his interest in the environment began. In order to take interesting photographs, he had to study the animals closely in order to capture their behaviour. He said that he had put himself through an undergraduate biology degree without realising it.
At the age of 35, Myers enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, to study wildlife management. Here he became interested in the threats that wildlife faced and took up an interdisciplinary doctorate, incorporating other subjects including economics and political science.
After graduating from Berkeley, he returned to Kenya and spent two years working on the status of the cheetah in Sub-Saharan Africa for the WWF. He questioned the accepted view that one species per year was going extinct – this didn’t include insects or unknown species – and calculated that it was more likely to be one species per day, increasing these estimates over time to 50 species per day, which would lead to extensive and indiscriminate species loss.
a lot of my career has been, no so much supplying the right answers to established questions, but trying to raise the right questions
Myers originated the concept of biodiversity hotspots in order to prevent mass extinctions. Hotspots are areas that have at least 1,500 unique vascular plants and that have lost at least 70% of their primary vegetation. There are 34 areas worldwide that meet this definition, and these sites support nearly 60% of all plant, bird, mammal, reptile and amphibian species. This has helped conservationists to prioritise their work and to protect the most species for the least cost. Hotspots are not formally recognised but being designated a hotspot means an area is more likely to get conservation investment.
Myers has been an adviser to the United Nations, the World Bank’s Global Environment Facility, and scientific academies in a number of countries. He is a patron of the charity Population Matters. In 1991 he was awarded the Blue Planet Prize.