Charles Wurster, Stony Brook University professor, dies at 92

Charles F. Wurster had been a bird-watcher since he was a teenager growing up in Philadelphia.

But his environmental activism got a jump start as a research associate at Dartmouth College, when he became aware of birds dying by the hundreds in the mid-1960s as a result of DDT pesticide spraying.

That activism would continue when he became a professor at Stony Brook University and, ultimately, a co-founder of the Environmental Defense Fund as it played a major role leading to the banning of DDT and related pesticides in 1972.

Wurster, who was living in Silver Spring, Maryland, died July 6 in the home of his daughter in nearby Arlington, Virginia. A lifelong asthmatic who never smoked, he died from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, a son said. He was 92 years old.

In a remembrance written by Wurster’s friends and associates, Carl Safina, president of the Safina Center in Setauket and the endowed research chair for nature and humanity at Stony Brook University, and Patricia Paladines, an adjunct instructor at Stony Brook’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences and co-president of the Four Harbors Audubon Society, recalled Wurster’s early environmental activism in 1963 while at Dartmouth in Hanover, New Hampshire.

“That spring the town of Hanover had sprayed their elm trees with DDT in a futile attempt to fend off bark beetles,” the pair wrote. “In the weeks that followed, many migrant birds who had arrived after the spraying were found dead. Wurster and fellow scientists at the college collected 151 bird carcasses, mostly American Robins . . . After a two-year battle led by the scientists, local spraying in Hanover was halted.”

Safina added in an interview that when he looks around and sees the soaring abundance of ospreys, as well as peregrine falcons and bald eagles “that were on the verge of extinction” in the 1960s, and “now we have complete recovery,” he thinks of Wurster.

“When you go to a bay anywhere on the Long Island Sound, West Meadow Beach here in Stony Brook, there are multiple nests of these magnificent birds,” Safina said of ospreys. “Their existence in the skies and along our shores are entirely the result of his [Wurster’s] work. They would have been completely gone if that work had not happened and if it had not succeeded.”

Erik Wurster of Brookline, Massachusetts, said his father “got interested in the natural world pretty early on. He was a birder.” But Erik, one of Wurster’s three children, said his father was not just an accomplished environmental advocate, “he was an equally loving, caring and committed father. He was just a good guy.”

Malcolm Bowman, distinguished service professor emeritus at Stony Brook’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, recalled his longtime colleague’s involvement with the formation of the “huge success story” that became the Environmental Defense Fund, or EDF, a nonprofit that now ranks as one of the top environmental groups in the world. “It all started over the pesticide DDT.” Bowman said Wurster “was one of the most determined men I ever met.”

A 1998 Newsday article noted how Wurster, who had arrived at Stony Brook University in 1965, “fell in with a group of equally committed environmentalists, the Brookhaven Town Natural Resources Committee,” which was trying to get Suffolk County officials to “listen to the case against DDT.” By 1967, the group incorporated as the Environmental Defense Fund.

Wurster said in that Newsday article: “A lawyer came into our midst. He had already filed a suit to stop the mosquito commission from using DDT, although he didn’t have much scientific support behind it. In joining with him, we brought science and the law together.”

Said Wurster of those years: “We had fun working on these things. We got along well together. Fighting the battle can be fun if you have the right team, and we had the feeling that it was better to fight and lose than not to fight at all.”

Wurster was born in Philadelphia. He graduated from Germantown Friends School, earned a bachelor of science degree in chemistry from Haverford College in 1952; a master’s in organic chemistry from the University of Delaware in 1954; and a doctorate in organic chemistry from Stanford University in 1957. He spent a year as a Fulbright Fellowship in Innsbruck, Austria, in 1957-58. He worked for the Monsanto Research Corp. from 1959 to 1962; as a post-doctorate researcher at Dartmouth from 1962 to 1965; and then at Stony Brook University from 1965 through 1994, where he served as an associate professor of environmental toxicology in the university’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences.

Wurster was divorced from Doris Hadley, who predeceased him, and they had a son, Steven. Wurster was also divorced from Eva Tank-Nielson, with whom he had his son Erik and daughter Nina. In addition to his three children, his survivors include his longtime companion Marie Gladwish of Washington State; and four grandchildren.

By Olivia Winslow

olivia.winslow@newsday.com@newsollie