Robert L. Bendick Jr. has been telling people about Block Island since the 1980s, when he was head of the state Department of Environmental Management and deeply involved in island conservation.

He went on to do similar work as a state official in New York and as vice president of The Nature Conservancy in Florida. But he kept in touch with people on Block Island, and he has one of the most eloquent summations of what happened out there.

Bendick loved telling the outside world about "Robbie Lewis, a retired sea captain who, in his cutoff pants and battered van, never tired of showing off the places he believed should be saved."

The Laphams and their donation of 140 acres to the trust was another favorite topic.

Bendick would laud The Nature Conservancy, the DEM, the Audubon Society of Rhode Island, various town groups, the late Sen. John H. Chafee and the Champlin Foundations, and describe how they teamed up to save the island's most beautiful places.

"One might suggest that what I have described is in large measure the successful effort of a few people to save a beautiful place for their exclusive use," Bendick said in one speech in 1990 in upstate New York, where he was trying to save more land in the Adirondacks. "It is not so."

"It is still true that warm days bring ferry loads of day-trippers from the mainland who ride their bicycles or go to the beaches or walk the nature trails where access is free. Sometimes it gets very crowded. But when the ferries leave, the island returns to its natural peace and beauty.

"The New Shoreham Chamber of Commerce backs land conservation because it has saved the island's only economic assets: its natural beauty. That protection will draw people to the hotels, restaurants and shops -- even the houses that occasionally go on the market.

"Homeowners are content because the character of the island (and the value of their investments) is protected.

"Environmentalists are pleased because the places they care about (including habitat for endangered and threatened species) have been saved from development and because visitor use is managed well."

Bendick said the effort to save Block Island has been so successful because: "People worked together without public posturing or competition for credit, because everyone established clear priorities and stuck to them, because Block Island is a small island with finite resources."

Bendick talked about a visit to the island in the summer of 1990 for the dedication of newly acquired conservation land.

"A large group of people gathered by a beautiful pond in the afternoon sun, and as we talked and shook hands, I realized that everyone still alive who had participated in the saving of the island's landscape was there, joined together in a sense of shared accomplishment unusual in this last, often tragically selfish and demeaning decade for the people of our country."

Bendick said he shook the calloused hand of Adrian Mitchell, who sold off the valuable development rights to his farm on Corn Neck Road and continued to work hard, managing the island's trails. And he became aware of something just as important.

"I recognized then why Block Island was a land conservation success. I realized that those of us from the state, from The Nature Conservancy, from other outside organizations, had only helped. I understood that the saving of this place came from the people of the place itself, from Rob Lewis, his son Keith, and Edie Blane and Dave Lapham and all the others whose families had come from Block Island or had been there for much of their lives.

"It was as if the island had been speaking through these local heroes to say, 'You need to save my beaches and bluffs and ponds and moors, because I need them to be me and to give you what I give you -- grace, quiet, beauty and adventure. In saving this place, you save yourselves.' "