The Passing of a Pine Barrens Partisan

Decades after hydrologists and other Earth scientists had identified the Central Pine Barrens of Long Island, N.Y., as sitting atop a vital aquifer and fostering a complex ecosystem, the 120,000 remaining acres were still being treated as scrublands. By the 1970s they separated the increasingly precious Hamptons and farm belt of the eastern end from the suburbs that had risen in western Suffolk County, and commercial interests had plans to put them to use: for industry or housing, generally, or odd one-offs like a fireworks factory or a huge ice rink. One golf course had already been built and others were envisioned. And that water beneath the surface? Some promoters wanted to bottle it. A trio of environmental academics took up for the forests (which include cedar and maple) and started the Long Island Pine Barrens Society in 1977. Before long they found their (foghorn) voice in P.R. man Dick Amper, an area resident and clean-water hound. The stakes were rising as the local development boom took off in the 1980s. As the society’s pugnacious director, and aided by an increasingly preservationist political bent on the East End, Amper got state protective legislation enacted in 1993. With that leverage and fitful support from surrounding town and county governments, the society by 2020 was celebrating the shielding of 100,000-plus acres from routine building–more than half of that from any disturbance at all. Amper stepped down in 2023 and died this week, one more departed warrior from the pivotal land-use battles of the Hamptons’ recent past.

Dick Amper, 81, tireless advocate for L.I. pine barrens and clean drinking water