RSS 2.0 FeedMarch 3, 2011, Bellmore Life
Richard Schary: lifelong commitment to the environment
The environment is his world; meet Richard Schary.
Richard Schary is a man with a mission: to keep the natural world alive and well in suburbia.
This North Bellmore resident was recently honored for his vision, dedication and drive as an environmental activist by the Long Island Volunteer Center and was recognized for his distinctive achievements.
“This is my life’s passion,” explained Mr. Schary, whose fondest childhood memories include camping with the Boy Scouts in the Long Island woods.
Mr. Schary grew up in East Rockaway in the 1950s during “that great wave of development that transformed the South Shore. I was a kid and it was pretty developed here, but then I went out to Suffolk County, to Blydenburgh Park for camping and wow, what a difference.”
Mr. Schary loved the outdoors and all the glorious green space. He became an an elementary school teacher for the New York City public school system, where he taught environmental and physical education for 33 years.
Meanwhile, he bought a house in North Bellmore and discovered that his community is “one of the few places [in Nassau County] that does not have any open space; there aren’t any parks in North Bellmore. It is 100% developed,” he said.
Over the years, Mr. Schary began to grow concerned about the loss of open space. Would other communities lose their open spaces, like North Bellmore? The question persisted and when Mr. Schary retired from teaching he began to seriously address this question.
“I did a lot of walking and jogging through the Greenbelt Trails, and I noticed how there was more and more new development. One day, sometime in the [early] 1990s, I remember seeing bulldozers. That’s when I knew I had to get involved,” he said.
Mr. Schary joined the Long Island Greenbelt Trail conference, becoming a board member. The organization builds and helps maintain hiking trails and works to protect open spaces.
One of Mr. Schary’s earliest challenges came when the state parks department announced that it planned on taking 300 acres of undeveloped park land to turn into a golf course at Bethpage State Park. “When I learned there was going to be a sixth golf course, I hit the wall. I slapped down Newsday on the table and I said to my wife, ‘Over my dead body.’ ”
In 1997, Mr. Schary co-founded an ad-hoc committee of volunteer user groups and successfully halted the project.
Other challenges followed. Together with his wife, Lisa Schary, an environmental activist in her own right, they formed coalitions to prevent overdevelopment at Kings Park Psychiatric Center, the State University of New York (SUNY) at Old Westbury woods, the Underhill property in Jericho and the construction of a 10-lane toll road on the Southern State Parkway.
“We saved about three quarters of the land in Jericho and we have, so far, avoided the expansion of Southern State Parkway,” said Mr. Schary.
Meanwhile, development in Nassau County continued.
“Although most of the open space on the South Shore of Nassau County is gone, there was lots of development on the North Shore. And here on the South Shore we began to see the re-development of places – the building of bigger and bigger houses, more strip malls,” said Mr. Schary, who became a founding member of the Nassau County Master Plan Taskforce.
“I helped write the first plan and worked on the first open space law with [then state] Assemblyman Thomas DiNapoli,” he said. Mr. DiNapoli, a Democrat from Great Neck, is now the state comptroller, elected in November to a full four-year term after being earlier selected by the state Legislature.
By 2000, Mr. Schary had additional challenges. He, along with his wife, helped establish the Trailview State Park, the Wantagh Nature Trail, the Meadowbrook Bioblitz and the Friends of Norman Levy Preserve. They also participated in groups that opposed the then-proposed windmill project off Jones Beach, and the once-proposed go-kart tracks in Cedar Creek Park.
Mr. Schary also founded the Friends of Massapequa Preserve in 2000. The preserve consists of 423 diverse acres of woodlands, ponds, lakes and freshwater wetlands managed by the Nassau County Parks Department.
Again Mr. Schary was walking through the woods and noticed “all the litter, fires, dumping, encroachment, parties and drinking going on in there. No one was taking care of the place, so Lisa and I stepped forward,” he said.
Along the way, they secured grant money, organized cleanups, led hikes and restored the preserve with other members. In 2004 an award-winning documentary was featured at the Long Island International Film Festival in Bellmore.
Today the Massapequa Preserve is the second-most visited park in Nassau County, with over 6,000 visitors each weekend using the multiuse trail. “We are so successful we now have the problem of overcrowding. But this is a good model, one we can use for other projects,” he said.
Mr. Schary is an appointed volunteer member of five Nassau County government committees, such as the Open Space Advisory Committee and the Unprotected Woodlands (Meadowbrook) Task force. He is the president of the Nassau County Citizens’ Police Academy Alumni Association, and sits on the Pine Barrens Law Enforcement Council, along with being an active member of numerous environmental groups.
The Sierra Club gave him the Environmentalist of the Year award in 1998, and in 2001 was named Person of the Year by the Bellmore Herald. He also won an “Environmental Vision” award from the Long Island Progressive Coalition.
But Mr. Schary has no plans to sit on his accomplishments.
He believes that there are still threats to our environment that need to be addressed. “I believe our parkways are being threatened. They were designed by Robert Moses as linear parks, besides transportation corridors. We can’t let our parkways become 10-lane expressways. Imagine the kinds of traffic that would occur on our local streets?
“And, the Meadowbrook Parkway would be ground zero – they’d want to run all kinds of utility lines and everything else they want to bring up from the ocean,” he said. “We will lose the open space along that corridor.”
Mr. Schary said that he and “Lisa will continue to get up every day and work as hard was we can. I’m very honored to receive this award [from the Long Island Volunteer Center]. Volunteers aren’t usually thanked for their hard work. But for Lisa and for me, it’s more than about being thanked. It’s a 24-hour-a-day job that we love and we can’t stop.”
