Arthur P. Cooley (June 2, 1934 – January 30, 2022) was an American 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.

degrees from Cornell University, and in 1956 joined the science faculty at Bellport High School in Brookhaven Hamlet, New York, living in East Patchogue.

In fall of 1965, Cooley helped bring together a small group of central Long Islanders concerned with local environmental issues such as farm runoff, sewage problems, waste dumps, groundwater contamination, and his own particular interest, saltwater marsh preservation.

The group included Bellport High School students, Dennis Puleston, and some of his Brookhaven National Laboratory colleagues, faculty members from Stony Brook University, and other activists.

As remembered by participant (and fellow EDF co-founder) Charles F. Wurster:[5] He could not only run an excellent meeting, but also had the remarkable ability to arouse people's enthusiasms about environmental topics.

[6] Others from BTNRC who provided expert testimony included Dennis Puleston, who presented the court with his own artistic renderings of the salt marsh food chain; Charles F. Wurster, a molecular biologist who had previously helped to stop the town of Hanover, New Hampshire, from using DDT to combat Dutch elm disease; George M. Woodwell, senior ecologist of the Brookhaven National Laboratory who had published on, among other things, the persistence of DDT in forest soils; Robert E. Smolker, professor of biological sciences at Stony Brook; and ecologist and ornithologist Antony S. Taormina, Regional Director of Fish and Game of the New York State Conservation Department.

[5] The group won a temporary injunction from the New York Supreme Court in August 1966 banning the county's use of DDT, and the Mosquito Commission switched to using the organophosphate Abate (temefos) instead.

The Audubon conventioneers delayed any action, so on October 6, 1967, the BTNRC activists—with a couple of new recruits from the convention—met in a conference room at Brookhaven Labs to sign the Certificate of Incorporation for the Environmental Defense Fund.

The registration fee was paid by Connecticut conservationist Bob Burnap, and $10,000 was pledged by Dr. H. Lewis Batts, Jr., professor of biology at Kalamazoo College (still in town after the Audubon convention), for an EDF campaign against dieldrin back in his home state of Michigan.

[4] In 1970, Cooley's friend, mentor, and fellow EDF trustee Dennis Puleston retired from Brookhaven Labs and was invited by the National Audubon Society to voyage to Antarctica on the MS Discoverer.