SUFFOLK CLOSEUP: Steven Englebright's Loss Is A Loss For The Environment

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

A big change resulting from the 2022 election in Suffolk County was the narrow defeat of 30-year (!) New York State Assemblyman Steven Englebright—a surprise upset. 

Steve for decades has been a giant in environmental affairs in Suffolk and the state. He was elected to the Suffolk Legislature in 1983 and in 1992 initially elected to the State Assembly. He has been the leading environmental figure in the New York State Legislature. He’s chair of the Assembly’s Environmental Conservation Committee. He’s been prime sponsor of hundreds of successful measures on the county and state levels on the environment.

“Nobody has made a bigger contribution to the environment,” commented Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele, Jr. last week. “Steve has been at the forefront of all the major environmental measures. He has made such a big difference,” said Thiele, of Sag Harbor, who has served with Englebright in the county and state legislatures.

Englebright, of Setauket, is especially proud that he helped “shape” the New York State Clean Air, Clean Water, and Green Jobs Bond Act approved overwhelmingly statewide in a referendum this past Election Day. He is equally proud of his labor last year on a “prelude to it,” a “Green Amendment” added to the state constitution. It, too, was approved overwhelmingly in a statewide referendum on Election Day 2021. 

Of the $4.2 billion bond act, he said: “We are an island, after all, and we need to challenge the overheating of the earth’s atmosphere and earth’s oceans. Long Island is at the frontline. It is important to do what we can to set an example to sister states and other nations in the fight against climate change.” The Green Amendment now enshrined into New York law declares that every person has “the right to clean air and water, and a healthful environment.”

A Democrat, he attributes his reported 23,707 to 22,734 loss to Republican lawyer Edward Flood to a spillover in Brookhaven Town of votes for town favorite son Lee Zeldin for governor, and “at the end of the campaign, dark money mailings full of misinformation and accusations over the bail issue.”

Steve’s love for the environment started early. He grew up in Bayside, Queens and “I saw the last farms in Bayside developed,” he was recalling last week. He spent time in “Bayside Woods—all gone now, built on. All the open space has been lost.” What happened to his boyhood home “left an indelible imprint.” He spent summers at the vegetable farm of his grandparents in Indiana. “I always walked in their shadow.” He spoke of his grandfather “leading me out into the field and showing me how to plant,” working in “my grandma’s garden” and exploring the “stream that ran along the farm. It was a very impactful part of my early life.” 

He went to the University of Tennessee for its “great geology program” and received a Bachelor’s Degree and later a Master’s in paleontology/sedimentology from Stony Brook University. Stony Brook hired him to “curate its geological collection.” Because of his background in museums—including as a junior curator at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum and volunteer in the vertebrae and paleontology collection at the American Museum of Natural History—he was asked to launch a museum. He founded the Museum of Long Island Natural Sciences at the university.

The first exhibit concerned the Long Island Pine Barrens. Steve understood the extraordinary purity of the water beneath the Pine Barrens, how their sandy porous soil allows rainwater to migrate cleanly to the aquifers below on which Long Islanders depend for all their potable water. Underneath the Pine Barrens, Englebright knew, was the finest of our water supply. And, he comprehended the ecological import of Pine Barrens habitat which includes many rare plants, birds and animals. 

In the 1970s and early 80s, hardly anyone else on Long Island understood any of this. The Pine Barrens were considered “scrub,” “wasteland”—not important like the land along the shoreline or farmland—and were designated in government development plans for industrial use.

The first exhibit focused on the Pine Barrens where the Hauppauge Industrial Park had gone—on top of Pine Barrens. “I had watched it, basically a complete ecosystem, wiped away and transformed into buildings and parking lots,” Steve recounted. He decided it “was basically unethical to simply document the passing of the ecosystem.” So, he decided to get into politics—running for the Suffolk Legislature—and through government get environmental action. 

Steve taught me and many others about the huge significance of the Pine Barrens. He would take people, one at a time, up Danger Hill in Manorville. From the top of it, one could see the Long Island Sound to the north, bays and the Atlantic Ocean to the south, and to the west and east great stretches of green Pine Barrens. We were looking, said Steve, at “Long Island’s reservoir.” He was critical to the passage of the Long Island Pine Barrens Protection Act of 1993 which has saved more than 100,000 acres of Pine Barrens. 

“I think I have the strongest environmental record in the history of the state legislature,” Steve said last week. What a loss his election defeat is to the state and this county!

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books.