Art Cooley
| Art Cooley | |
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Cooley in 2008
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Arthur P. "Art" Cooley (born June 2, 1934) is a former biology teacher, naturalist and expedition leader, and a co-founder of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF).
In the mid-1960s, while a teacher at Bellport High School on New York's Long Island, Cooley was one of several local activists who came together to stop the use of the pesticide/pollutant DDT by the Suffolk County Mosquito Control Commission. From that successful collaboration emerged the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), a non-profit environmental advocacy group with offices nationwide, and representatives working around the world. By 2012 EDF claimed 700,000 members and nearly $100 million in annual support.
Cooley grew up on New York's Long Island. He earned his B.S. and M.S. degrees from Cornell University, and in 1956 joined the science faculty at Bellport High School in Brookhaven Hamlet, New York, living in East Patchogue. He taught for 33 years, and retired from Bellport in 1989. While a teacher he traveled to Scotland as a Fulbright Exchange Teacher and participated in several National Science Foundation (NSF) Institutes, including an academic year at Harvard University.
During his first year at Bellport, Cooley met prominent local resident and fellow bird-watcher, adventurer-naturalist Dennis Puleston. Puleston had come to Brookhaven after World War II as Director of Technical Information for Brookhaven National Laboratory. The two "birders" became friends, and soon began a tradition of taking Bellport students along on half-day bird-watching expeditions and nature walks on weekends. They traveled to sites across Long Island and, eventually, beyond.
In 1962, with support from an NSF Marine Science initiative, Cooley went to Bowdoin College in Maine for a marine biology course. Afterward, he instituted a summer marine biology program for his own students — as well as for adults at Stony Brook University. The course included classroom lectures in the mornings and field work in the afternoons.
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