Stony Brook Research

• RESEARCH MILESTONES
• Painless Colonoscopy
• Nobel Prize for MRI
• Protein Folding Simulation
• First Virus Synthesis
• Dino Bird
• Only One With Two CATs
• Managing a National Lab
• First Two SUNY Drugs
• Most Distant Galaxies
• Finding the Top Quark
• Unlocking the Gene
• Finding the Missing Link
• Cause of Lyme Disease
• Life by the Numbers
• Origin of the Ozone Hole
• The Age of the Moon
• Protecting the Environment

Image courtesy of Environmental Defense

Founding of the Environmental Defense Fund, 1967
The Environmental Defense Fund (now called Environmental Defense) was started almost four decades ago when early Marine Sciences faculty member Charles Wurster joined three Long Island scientist colleagues – Arthur Cooley, Dennis Puleston and George Woodwell – in seeking to halt the use of DDT (dichlorodiphenyl trichloroethane), the pesticide Rachel Carson warned about in her milestone book, Silent Spring. The first and one of the most popular pesticides on the planet at the time, DDT was implicated in threats to the survival of species including the osprey, bald eagle and peregrine falcon. Prof. Wurster had observed DDT’s negative effects on songbirds in New Hampshire. The four scientists signed the articles of incorporation of the Environmental Defense Fund in Dr. Woodwell's office at Brookhaven National Lab after successfully suing Suffolk County to stop spraying DDT.

For more than half a century, efforts to protect the environment had focused on land conservation, designating millions of acres as national and state parks to protect them and their plant and animal inhabitants from the encroaching forces of development. The EDF’s founders pioneered an additional, very different approach to environmental preservation, which has since become familiar but represented a thoroughgoing innovation at the time: they went to court on behalf of the environment. Their efforts led to a nationwide ban on DDT and the birth of modern environmental law. The osprey has since made a dramatic recovery – on Long Island and elsewhere – and the bald eagle and peregrine falcon have been removed from the endangered species list – itself a legislative response, as part of the Endangered Species Act of 1973, to DDT's threat to our National Symbol, the bald eagle.

The Environmental Defense Fund that was created to provide a permanent organization to develop and lead such efforts has become one of the nation’s most influential environmental advocacy groups, now with over 300,000 members and more Ph.D. scientists and economists on staff than any similar organization. Notable successes include getting all hunted whales onto the U.S. endangered species list; incorporating innovative market-based methods into the 1990 Clean Air Act to cut air pollution, leading to less acid rain; getting McDonald's to accept recommendations that will eventually eliminate a cumulative total of more than 150,000 tons of packaging waste; helping the Panará Indians of Brazil win protection for their homeland, preserving 1.2 million acres of Amazonian rainforest from deforestation; and successfully encouraging FedEx to introduce new U.S.-built hybrid electric delivery trucks in several markets, reducing emissions by up to 90% and cutting fuel use by half.