Richard Amper, longtime champion for preserving Long Island’s pine barrens and other environmental causes, dies at 81

Richard Amper, an advocate for Long Island’s natural places for more than 40 years, has died at 81.

Amper, who was known as Dick, began working to protect Long Island’s pine barrens from development in the 1980s, an effort that culminated in a law preserving more than 105,000 acres of pitch pine and oak forest, and red maple and Atlantic white cedar swamplands.

He served as executive director of the Long Island Pine Barrens Society for decades.

“Dick Amper was a giant of a man and a relentless advocate for the Long Island pine barrens,” Elina Alayeva, the president of the Society, said in a statement. “He redefined what environmental advocacy could look like, showing us how to be both principled and strategic, and combining deep commitment with a sharp, disciplined approach that proved essential in securing lasting protections for the pine barrens. His legacy lives on in the land he fought so hard to preserve and in all of us who carry his work forward.”

Amper championed many other environmental causes, including banning toxic chemicals from children’s toys, protecting drinking and groundwater, and curbing nitrogen pollution in local waterways.

He and his wife, Robin Hopkins Amper, who also fought for the pine barrens, lived in Forest Hills and Melville before settling in Lake Ronkonkoma in the early 1970s, where they successfully opposed a housing development planned for the lake’s shore. His wife died in 2019.

Amper earned the admiration from other advocates for the environment and from politicians.

Suffolk County Executive Ed Romaine said in a statement, “His work preserving open space and clean water is legendary, and because of his efforts, generations to come will have the pine barrenss and thousands of acres of open space in their backyard.”

John Turner, a co-founder of the pine barrens Society who worked with Amper for many years, wrote, “Anyone who cares about nature on Long Island, her preserves and open spaces, and the plants and animals that call these places home, owes a tremendous debt of gratitude to Dick Amper.”

Amper was known for being brash and irascible when defending the causes he believed in.

“Dick was as much as a force of nature as a pine barrens wildfire,” Turner added, “as unique as the globally rare dwarf pine plains, and as dependable in his commitment to the cause as the call of a whip-poor-will on a moonlit night in June. He will be missed.”