The Long Island Pine Barrens Society has embarked on an initiative titled the Best of the Rest — an effort to protect 3,800 acres of Pine Barrens, an addition to one of the great environmental achievements for Long Island. That’s the state’s Long Island Pine Barrens Protection Act of 1993, through which some 106,000 acres of Pine Barrens have been protected.
The 3,800 additional acres involve a diversity of Pine Barrens land.
Diversity has been a hallmark of how saving the Pine Barrens has come about. It has involved bipartisan political leadership — notably former Assemblyman Steve Englebright, of East Setauket, a Democrat and a former chairman of the Assembly’s Environmental Conservation Committee; ex-State Sen. Kenneth LaValle, of Port Jefferson, a Republican; former Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr., of Sag Harbor, then a Republican; former Assemblyman Tom DiNapoli, of Great Neck Plaza, a Democrat, another former Environmental Conservation Committee chairman and now the state comptroller; and the late Gov. Mario Cuomo, a Queens Democrat.
Environmental activists were, of course, critical, too, led by the Pine Barrens society and its longtime executive director, Richard Amper, of Ridge. Also deeply involved was a leader of the Long Island business community, the late Edwin M. (Buzz) Schwenk, of Southampton, executive director of the Long Island Builders Institute and a former chairman of the Suffolk County Republican Party.
Englebright, who’s now back in the Suffolk County Legislature, was and is central. A geologist, he had been curator of geology at Stony Brook University and founder of its Museum of Long Island Natural Sciences. Its first exhibit was on the Pine Barrens, focusing on a lost stretch on which the Hauppauge Industrial Park was built.
Englebright was thoroughly knowledgeable about the purity of the water beneath the Pine Barrens, and how its sandy, porous soil allows rainwater to percolate cleanly down to the aquifer below, on which Long Islanders depend as their sole source of potable water.
And Englebright decided, as he later told me, that it “was basically unethical to simply document the passing of an ecosystem” with this exhibit, so he entered politics, running for the Suffolk Legislature in 1982, and won.
In the 1970s and early ’80s, hardly anyone else in this area understood the vital importance of the Pine Barrens, other than Pine Barrens Society founders John Cryan, John Turner and Robert McGrath. The Pine Barrens were seen as scrub — not important, like land along the shoreline or farmland.
Englebright would take people, one at a time — including me — up a hill in Manorville topped with a fire lookout tower. From it, you could see Long Island Sound to the north, bays and Atlantic Ocean to the south, and to the west and east, great stretches of green Pine Barrens. We were looking, Englebright, would say, at “Long Island’s reservoir.”
The Long Island Pine Barrens Protection Act is multi-faceted. It designated a “core preservation area” of more than 50,000 acres in which development is severely restricted; the use of a transfer-of-development-rights mechanism allowing landowners in it to develop at other locations; and a “compatible growth area” where some development is allowed if environmentally sound; and it created a Pine Barrens Commission to oversee the plan.
But as the Pine Barrens Society relates, at pinebarrens.org/the-best-of-the-rest, “the Pine Barrens has not reached its full ecological, hydrological, or recreational potential. There are still thousands of acres of undeveloped properties in and adjacent to both the Core Preservation and Compatible Growth Areas whose protection would safeguard our drinking water resources.”
Some funds for the additional acreage are expected to come from the State Environmental Bond Act of 2022, which authorized $4.2 billion for environmental projects, among them for clean drinking water.
The Pine Barrens Society is funding the Best of the Rest campaign with help from a $20,000 grant from the New York Community Trust-Long Island. As Nina Leonhardt, acting executive director of the Wading River-based Pine Barrens Society, and Amper, now its executive director emeritus, wrote in a recent appeal for tax-deductible contributions, “The Society’s greatest success was reaching our long-sought goal of successfully preserving more than 100,000 acres of Pine Barrens … We can’t thank Long Islanders enough!”
Karl Grossman is an author, TV program host and professor of journalism at the State University of New York at Old Westbury.
