Norman Myers (24 August 1934 – 20 October 2019) was a British environmentalist specialising in biodiversity and also noted for his work on environmental refugees. Biography Myers was born in Whitewell (Lancashire, then Yorkshire) and was raised until the age of 11 on the family farm, without electricity, gas or an internal toilet. He lived in Kenya for over 30 years and later settled in Headington, Oxford, England. He attended grammar school and then the University of Oxford (BA French and German, Keble College 1958, MA 1963) and became a District Officer in the last few years of the Kenya Administration from 1958 to 1961. He then worked as a high school teacher in Nairobi from 1961 to 1966 and a freelance writer and broadcaster until 1969. In 1972, after PhD studies at the University of California, Berkeley (graduated 1973) he became a consultant for the UN, the World Bank and other organisations, remaining in Kenya until the early 1980s. He and Dorothy have a daughter, retired marathon runner Mara Yamauchi, who they raised in Kenya until the age of 8. He died in Oxford on 20 October 2019 after a long illness. Career Myers was an advisor to organisations including the United Nations, the World Bank, scientific academies in several countries, and various government administrations worldwide. He was an Honorary Visiting Fellow at Green College, Oxford University, and an adjunct professor at Duke University and the University of Vermont. Other vising academic appointments were at Harvard, Cornell, Stanford, Berkeley, Michigan and Texas Universities. He is a patron of London-based population concern charity Population Matters. Myers's work has ranged over diverse critical global issues and includes 18 books and over 250 scientific papers, produced while working as a consultant and in temporary academic posts. In the late 1970s, his work addressed rapidly accelerating decline of tropical forests. His estimates were later verified through satellite imagery. In the early 1980s Myers addressed the issue of deforestation in the context of land conversion for cattle production, a process that he called the "hamburger connection", showing the international linkages between industrial food production and environmental decline. He did some of the early work on biodiversity, highlighting the critical importance of "biodiversity hotspots" – regions that are home to a disproportionately high number of species. This work was cited when he was named 2007 Time Magazine Hero of the Environment. Myers proposed, (in Nature,