Suffolk Closeup: Celebrate and save Long Island’s wetlands

The 14th annual celebration of World Wetlands Day was held last week. The fact that the event is only in its 14th year is telling — an acknowledgement of how long it has taken for the critical importance of wetlands to be recognized.

I’ve witnessed this slow recognition on Long Island, much of which was once fringed with wetlands, including some that are now filled in. When I began as a journalist here in the 1960s, there was general ignorance about the important role of wetlands. Money was being made in filling in what were considered useless marshes, and there were those in government joining in the profit-making.

As an investigative reporter for the Long Island Press, I exposed how the Suffolk Department of Public Works (DPW) utilized a huge dredge to suck up bay bottom and deposit it as fill on wetlands in Southampton Town so they could be used for housing developments.

Then Suffolk DPW Commissioner Rudolph Kammerer moonlighted as an engineer on these developments, working with C. Marvin Raynor, then president of the Southampton Town Trustees. Mr. Raynor laid out plans for bulkheading that would front the wetlands, making filling possible. As a trustee, he voted for the dredging, bulkheading and fill depositing.

The articles forced the sale of the county dredge — but the struggle to save Long Island wetlands continued and goes on to this day. Extensive damage has been done to the wetlands by county ditches dug in the name of mosquito control. Further, the county has regularly doused the
wetlands with toxic pesticides — including past use of DDT — to kill mosquitoes, although marine and bird life can die as well.

Just out is a comprehensive book on the variety of life in the wetlands, their vital importance and the destruction that has been going on: “Tidal Marshes of Long Island, New York.”Published by the Torrey Botanical Society, the oldest botanical organization in the western hemisphere, it is full of fascinating essays, vivid color photos, maps and charts.

The book is edited by Dr. John Potente who fought against the county’s damaging undertakings in the wetlands as a member of the Suffolk Council on Environmental Quality. He resigned from the council in 2007 in protest against these activities, joined by environmental attorney Lauren Stiles and members representing Riverhead and Southold towns.

Dr. Potente contributes a chapter, along with Philip Weinberg, who as head of the New York State Attorney General’s Environmental Protection Bureau in the 1970s pioneered legal protection for Long Island wetlands. Contributors also include Larry Penny, East Hampton Town’s director of natural resources; Professor Christopher Gobler of the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University; and Matthew Atkinson, former general counsel for Peconic Baykeeper.

“Long Island’s salt marshes,” writes Dr. Potente, “play an important ecological role as nursery grounds for finfish, shellfish and marine plankton, as well as providing a buffer against ocean storms.” He speaks of the “filling of marshlands with trash and concrete [and] the development of waterfront property” as major causes of wetlands destruction. And there are the impacts of pollution.

He elaborates on how “linear ditches were dug out of pristine marshlands” and Long Island wetlands were “saturated with DDT” and other poisonous pesticides.

“Today, reducing human impacts on our salt marshes is imperative because so much marshland already has been irretrievably lost,” he declares.Mr. Penny writes: “Despite the laments of Rachel Carson and a handful of conservationists, before the mid-1960s salt marshes had a reputation rivaling that of weed patches … Across Long Island, in a span of less than 15 postwar years, a quarter of the salt marshes, especially those along the South Shore bays, were filled over.”

The chapter by Mr. Weinberg, who went on to become a professor at St. John’s University School of Law, centers on the 1973 passage of the Long Island Wetlands Law — over the intense opposition of Long Island development interests. He writes: “Long Island’s and the state’s wetlands remain vital and irreplaceable resources” and “their continued survival depends on sufficient resources, and penalties, being deployed to protect them.”

This new, forceful yet elegant book illuminates a battle that continues.