North Fork Environmental Council’s Mark Haubner to step down as president

Mark Haubner is taking his local environmental expertise and lifelong pursuit for meaningful impact to the global stage.

After 45 years of involvement with the North Fork Environmental Council, and nearly five years as the group’s president, Mr. Haubner announced his retirement to pursue new ventures. He will officially step down from the role in early May.

However, this is not a final goodbye, as he will continue to support NFEC’s various environmental projects and initiatives, and be of aid to other East End environmental groups.

“It’s fake retirement,” the uber-volunteer joked. 

His relentless advocacy centers around educating the public that all of the Earth’s natural systems are intertwined, and that the solutions to the ecological problems facing the North Fork are also intertwined with each other. This next chapter for Mr. Haubner answers a calling to promote eco-literacy and bioregioning on a more worldwide scale. 

With this extra time, he plans to host classes and workshops on several national and international platforms including Bio4Climate.org, India-based Shaktify.IN and Seacoast New Hampshire Permaculture to widen his reach and engage with a more targeted audience. He said he also wants to use more of his experience in creating community-based social marketing programs at a bioregional level with global impacts.

“We’ve got international superstars on our roster,” he said. “If we can get Fort Collins [in] Colorado, Riverhead and somewhere in India to talk about what they’re doing for sustainability at the same time, then we have that global reach.”

A self-proclaimed “Climate Disruption Effectivist,” Mr. Haubner dedicates his days to myriad nonprofit organizations, all of which focus on protecting the North Fork environment. To just name a few, he continues to serve as co-chair of the Town of Riverhead Environmental Advisory Committee and is a member of Suffolk County Council on Environmental Quality. 

Mr. Haubner’s passion for the planet started at a young age, he previously told the Riverhead News-Review. He’s been recycling newspapers since he was 11 years old. He credited his mother, aunt and uncle for inspiring him to be more conscious about the impact humans have on the planet. 

The North Fork Environmental Council began in 1972 and celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2022. In 1980, he formed a friendship with NFEC’s late founder Anne Lowry and first got involved as a volunteer.

He learned about the nonprofit’s nonstop efforts by listening to passionate preservationists such as Howard Meinke and Frank Willis, and wanted to join them at full speed. To boost his credentials, he received his certification from the University of California San Diego in Sustainability and Behavior Change in 2015.

“Mark has been a tireless environmental advocate on the North Fork for decades and has educated countless residents to step up and do what they can to “Save What’s Left” in both Riverhead and Southold,” said Anne Murray, Southold Town land use coordinator for the NFEC, referring to the group’s slogan. “We have all learned a lot from Mark.”

The North Fork Environmental Council has celebrated many wins in the last few years, Mr. Haubner said. Through robust partnerships, Southold became the second municipality on Long Island to launch a food scraps-to-compost program. In 2022, the NFEC found a home for the Repair Café in Greenport — an international community-building movement where volunteers help out their neighbors fix broken household items, rather than throwing them out.

He is currently working with Riverhead Town on a unique and inexpensive approach to protecting the wetlands and marshes in Meetinghouse Creek from further pollution.

He and other members of Riverhead’s Environmental Advisory Committee are actively pursuing a Bronze Certification in New York’s Climate Smart Communities program. There are also efforts to produce an internationally-supported (ICLEI) Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience Plan designed by North Fork residents.

“Mark is all about digging in to discover easy, doable ways to be smarter about protecting our limited resources. Who knew there are so many ways to reimagine, reduce, reinvent and repurpose, and ultimately save bundles of money? Well, Mark knows,” said Cindy Clifford, president of the Heart of Riverhead Civic Association. “Luckily, as he takes his knowledge to the global stage, he’ll still continue to bring smart programs to the East End.”

Mr. Haubner said hiring Toqui Terchun and Ms. Murray as NFEC’s land use coordinators this past year is another notable accomplishment for the council.

“Mark is the reason I’ve become a part of NFEC,” Ms. Terchun said. “His macro and micro look at our global climate unites our five East End towns as a ‘bioregion.'”

His climate-action to-do list is never-ending, but Mr. Haubner is confident to hand off the rest of his list of “must haves” to the next generation of environmental activists, and the seasoned stewards continuing the work.

Some of these not yet addressed issues include the need for tree codes for Southold and Riverhead, irrigation regulations, stormproof building codes, protection for shoreline residents, solid waste management and density restrictions with workforce housing.

“We’ve got people carrying the ball,” he said. “Nobody has to do everything, but everyone has to do something — no matter how small it may seem at the time.”