The State of New York is barreling fast toward the anticipated legalization of the sale and possession of marijuana as a way to increase tax receipts and reduce the impact of arrests for possession and sale, which fall disproportionately on people of color and the poor. Whether legalization would be statewide is an open question; the draft under consideration in Albany would allow cities and counties to retain current prohibitions. 

The Suffolk Legislature is considering its own “opt-out” bill, sponsored by Legislator Rob Trotta of Fort Salonga, a retired county police detective. Mr. Trotta’s view is that marijuana can lead to the use of more dangerous addictive drugs. This was echoed by several speakers at a Feb. 25 hearing in Hauppauge. The link between pot and opioid addiction, however, is not clear-cut.

Numerous studies have shown that, contrary to Mr. Trotta’s opinion, marijuana legalization is associated with lower rates of opioid use.

In the Journal of General Internal Medicine recently an analysis of an insurance database of more than 4.8 million medical marijuana users showed the rate of prescriptions for high-risk opioids, as well as the chronic use of all opioids, was “modestly lower.” According to another study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, prescriptions for all opioids decreased by 3.7 million doses a day after medical marijuana dispensaries opened in the United States. Other studies have demonstrated a reduction in the use of other pain medicines, as well as in alcohol and tobacco consumption. Certainly there is room for more research, but the overwhelming evidence is that marijuana is less of a gateway drug than some fear.

Mr. Trotta’s stance against legalized marijuana is likely to have more to do with his bid for the Republican Suffolk executive nomination than anything else. He announced his candidacy last month and would need to get past County Comptroller John Kennedy, the other major G.O.P. hopeful according to Newsday, to appear on the ballot in November. Whipping up fears about drug-crazed abusers could play well among those voters Mr. Trotta would need to succeed. 

Make no mistake, there is a disturbing subtext to Mr. Trotta’s bill, namely the disproportionate number of marijuana arrests of people of color, who are significantly more often to be in trouble with the law for possession than whites. Start Smart NY, a group in favor of legalization, presented a report this week indicating that blacks and Latinos accounted for between 60 and 66 percent of marijuana possession arrests in Nassau and Suffolk Counties while being only about 30 percent of the population. Within the white population, the reverse is true: In Suffolk, whites are 69 percent of the population but accounted for just 32 percent of marijuana arrests. The arrest rate for whites was slightly more equitable in Nassau County, but only by about 8 percent, which is still a massive imbalance.

As objectionable a strategy as Mr. Trotta’s approach might be, it could be smart politics for him and other county Republicans. In 2016, Donald Trump won Suffolk by a healthy margin over Hillary Clinton in a presidential campaign in which the eventual winner’s opening shots were at people of color, and he has continued to fan racial divisions in the two years since taking office. A key portion of the state measure would allow low-level marijuana arrest and conviction records to be sealed, an issue that now can make it difficult for some New Yorkers to find or retain jobs. 

We hope the Legislature votes down Mr. Trotta’s bill. Access to marijuana will continue to be easy whether or not it is legalized in Suffolk. But if it is not made legal the unfair effect of its prohibition on people of color will certainly continue. 

When it comes time to repair the town docks, Ed Michels, East Hampton Town’s chief harbormaster, will order taller pilings. This, as he said in a jaw-dropper of a story here by Christopher Walsh, is because sea level rise has made existing pilings too short during excessively high tides. And just like that, the town and many of its residents will begin to adjust.

Warming of the atmosphere caused by human activity is largely absorbed by the oceans, which, for a variety of reasons including the melting of the polar ice caps, is causing average water levels to rise. Ordinary northeaster storms now regularly flood the bays and harbors, Mr. Michels said. A bulkhead at Three Mile Harbor must be replaced with one much taller. Salt water threatens electricity supply pedestals at boat slips. The bellwether Napeague Meadow Road, which used to flood once or twice a year, now has water on it regularly. Gerard Drive in Springs is in dire need of help after a succession of destructive storms.

In addition to property damage, warmer, wetter winters have contributed to a rise in tick-borne illnesses. Where the oddball allergy to red meat caused by the bite of the lone-star tick was all but unknown, now the number of cases seen at one East Hampton medical practice alone exceeds 700. Other people suffer from far more dangerous illnesses, such as babesiosis and Lyme disease, which were once rare.

“This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper,” T.S. Eliot said, and in a sense, his doomsday poem predicted the incremental changes we now see. It is as simple as storm tides’ exceeding their usual bounds and as complex as doing something to end it.

One of the good things here in 2018 could just as easily have turned out to be a tangled mess. After chemicals known to be harmful to health and the environment were found in groundwater in Wainscott, East Hampton Town, county officials, and the Suffolk Water Authority moved with remarkable speed to protect residents.

While the physical source of the contamination has not been identified, and may never be, residents were offered bottled water immediately and a water main’s extension went into overdrive. Now, just over a year since the scope of the challenge became evident, contractors are near completion of eight-and-a-half miles of new water main, able to provide safe drinking water to the approximately 520 properties in the area affected by compounds used in industrial applications and, perhaps most relevant, firefighting foam.

Questions remain to be answered, however. Some will be dealt with in court, in lawsuits by the town, state, and county against the foam manufacturers and fire departments that used the foam in the past at a practice site near East Hampton Airport. Other issues include the high cost of connecting houses to the water mains, which can run into tens of thousands of dollars, depending on the distance and complexity of the terrain. Also of concern is what might lurk in drinking water elsewhere in New York. Similar contamination has been identified upstate in Newburgh, Plattsburgh, and Rome, and on Long Island in Patchogue, Islip, Bohemia, Bethpage, and Medford. The list goes on.

Then there is a big unknown of the long-term effect on wildlife. Groundwater in the affected area tends to move toward Georgica and Wainscott Ponds. PFOS and PFOA, as the chemicals are called, accumulate in air-breathing animals, increasing in concentration as they move up the food chain. The long-term environmental impact might be years away from becoming known.

Montauk residents rose up at Town Hall this week, alarmed that new, long-term planning for the hamlet was about to become law. More than a few of those who spoke complained they had not been told anything about the multiyear project now nearing completion. Ah, the information age.

One of the things governments and newspapers must contend with today is that they can no longer expect everyone to come to them. Rather, information must be walked directly to an increasingly fractured audience, wherever and however each segment of the public finds out about the world beyond their homes. Long gone are the days when the nightly newscasts on the big three TV networks told us how it was. Today, even for the civic-minded, there are too many distractions.

The Star learned this when the Army Corps Montauk sandbag fiasco began some years ago. Despite advance coverage running well past 100,000 words, when the bulldozers began tearing up a natural dune, surprise and outrage followed, expressed largely on social media, particularly via Instagram. We felt flat-footed.

As to the current hamlet work, The Star first started reporting on these studies about three years ago. As early as February of last year, this page lauded a blockbuster concept of moving Montauk’s motels and residences threatened by erosion inland. “This is headline-grabbing stuff,” we declared. Well, perhaps not. Perhaps we, like government officials, should seek additional pathways, or platforms, for bringing attention to the big stuff.

The natural reaction for those who worked for months and years on the hamlet studies, as well as those of us in the news media, is to be peeved when the cries of “Why weren’t we told!” ring out. Yes, it would be better if people were more knowledgeable about what was going on in their neighborhood, hamlet, or town, but ordinary, daily things get in the way. Busy lives, multiple jobs, a desire to step back from national and international problems by binge- watching Netflix all contribute to the gap between what we should be aware of and the extent to which we are in the dark.

A hypothetical document like the Montauk Hamlet Study or any of the others recently completed is less than likely to draw widespread attention until it is completed. Such is the nature of modern life, and perhaps human nature itself. Still, there were elements that The Star and Town Hall could have made a bigger deal about. To be charitable, it is an education for all of us when every new bit of tech or mobile app comes along. But the public, too, has its own obligation to stay informed, at least when they have the time.

Watching the confirmation hearing this week for William Barr as attorney general, we were struck that for the most part the senators stuck to their four-minute limits, often making note of the remaining seconds. This is in particular contrast to regularly held hearings in East Hampton Town Hall, where the three-minute countdown clock for individual speakers is mostly ignored. We have an idea that might help.

It is in the interest of comity for the town board to allow those members of the public who care to address it in person a little latitude on time. However, there are some individuals whose, shall we say, abiding interest in civic engagement compels them to rise and make comments on just about everything that comes up. For this, we have two words: poker chips.

Each person who plans to speak at a meeting of the town board would be handed two or three chips at the outset, redeemable each time they approach the microphone. When one’s chips were used up, he or she would have to find another way to express opinions, for example, in a protest march, or Facebook hoo-rah, or, yes, in a letter to the editor of The Star. Chips, of course, could not be shared with another person nor hoarded for the next meeting.

If the United States Senate can mind the minutes and maintain good order, so too can East Hampton Town Hall, one would think. It’s chips or find money in the budget to buy Town Clerk Carole Brennan a huge metal gong. Now that’s something we really would like to see.

New York State’s junior senator, Kirsten Gillibrand, made public her bid for the Democratic presidential nomination this week in an appearance on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” This made national news, but in East Hampton, the announcement seemed to draw little notice. 

Ms. Gillibrand had been a member of the House of Representatives from the upstate district that includes Albany before her appointment as senator in 2009 by Gov. David Paterson. She was little known statewide at that point and that she was to succeed Hillary Clinton, whom President Obama had made secretary of state in his first term, surprised many observers. Time proved that Mr. Paterson was onto something in selecting her; since winning a special election in 2010 to fill out Mrs. Clinton’s term, she has scored landslide wins over her Republican rivals.

Yet 10 years later, Ms. Gillibrand might be as unfamiliar to East End residents as she was when she represented New York’s 20th Congressional District. From her start in the Senate, she has seen her role as that of a national figure, working on such issues as sexual violence within the military and health measures for 9/11 responders. Ms. Gillibrand has made few visits to East Hampton during her time in the Senate, but then, her colleague, Senator Charles Schumer, has not been around much either.

It is fitting perhaps that she chose to make her presidential bid known in a television appearance. At least Mr. Colbert’s show is seen throughout the state.

Unless you are a person who thinks the Apollo Moon landings were faked, perhaps, or that the Earth is flat, it is impossible to argue with NASA’s observations of sea level rise. Satellites tracking the oceans’ surface since 1993 have measured a steady increase, now nearly three and a half inches since Bill Clinton’s first year as president.

Three and a half inches might not sound like much, but in such a short time, the unrelenting rate is extremely alarming for coastal communities. Coastal tide gauges show an even greater rate of rise. As the National Aeronautics and Space Administration explains, sea level rise is caused for the most part by global warming. There are two main factors: higher temperatures that cause seawater to expand and added water from melting ice sheets and glaciers.

Just this week, a new study revealed that the Greenland ice cap is melting about four times faster than previously thought. The volume of water from the loss of approximately 280 billion tons of ice a year, and sometimes as high as 400 billion tons a year, was described by National Geographic as more than enough to cover Florida and New York “hip deep” in meltwater, and then some.

Fortunately, this is not going to happen anytime soon, if only because the world’s oceans are 70 percent greater than the land mass, so the inflow is widely dispersed. But the relentless landward movement of mean high water, though only a few millimeters a year, makes for dramatic changes in places where sea meets land — like Long Island.

What the increase of the past 20 years has meant for coastal erosion depends a lot on location. Nonetheless, anyone who has watched the beaches, particularly on the bay side of Long Island, can report that the destruction of dunes accelerated over that time. One very rough rule of thumb is that for every inch of sea level rise, about a foot of dune or beach is lost. Anecdotally, that appears to be in the ballpark, with houses notably at the brink in Montauk and Amagansett and an intractable problem along the developed Montauk ocean shoreline.

A rising sea has grave implications for waterfront property owners, many of whom bought houses that were built well before the science was understood. It will also challenge local governments, like East Hampton’s, where 1990s-era regulations banning erosion control structures are already being ignored as impractical. 

As individuals, there is little we can do other than reduce our use of fossil fuels and push elected officials to take a firm stand on climate change. Unless far greater action is taken, children born today on Long Island will experience a massive remaking of the landscape from more than two feet of sea level rise by their old age. They will curse our memory if we do not press for everything possible to slow the pace of our rapidly warming planet.

If President Trump managed one thing with his televised pitch on Tuesday — ostensibly for his signature border wall — he pushed the Russian election-interference investigation out of the top news for a couple of days. Not surprisingly, his last-ditch effort came at a time when the new Democratic majority in the House of Representatives was getting itself gathered to direct its own attention to the president, his family, and his associates, and the Mueller investigation continued to pile up evidence — and guilty pleas.

Returning to the theme that launched his campaign, Mr. Trump made a number of demonstrably false claims. It was a filibuster of sorts, since even he must understand that a wall between the United States and Mexico would have only a marginal effect on already declining illegal immigration. Major networks and newspapers lost no time on Tuesday night debunking what he said about the numbers, drugs, and the effect on U.S. jobs. Also, even Mr. Trump must have understood that the wall had become a losing issue after his “caravan” mania leading up to the November election was shrugged off by voters in a solid Democratic rout.

This leaves distraction. If there is one thing the president knows it is the power of a shiny object. It is too bad for him that Robert Mueller and the House Democrats are not about to take the bait.

Amid a period of transition following the appointment of Andrea Grover as its director, there has been one charming constant at Guild Hall, the annual Student Art Festival. The program opened last week with a round of performances. A show of paintings, small sculpture, photography, drawing, and collage will be on view Fridays through Mondays, through Feb. 24. Workshops led by educators from Golden Eagle Artist Supply will be held on Saturday.

The exhibition itself is a pleasure, year in and year out. High schoolers produce highly accomplished work, often quite serious in tone and theme. Younger students’ work is a riot of color, pattern, and joy. One of the fascinating things about the whole K-through-12 extravaganza is how different each school’s entries are. Tiny Wainscott’s pieces are always standouts. Springs, as perhaps befits a place where the legendary Abstract Expressionists Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and Willem and Elaine de Kooning painted, are wildly expressive — plus the Springs School’s epic fourth-grade opera is staged each fall. 

Art matters. Educators say over and over again that such creative activities are not simply a luxury for the most well-off districts, they are an essential building block of many of the qualities needed in adulthood for success and satisfaction. These include the hand-eye skills developed in a toddler’s scribbling and even decision-making, as simple as the choice of which color to use where when coloring. As children get a little older, art sparks inventiveness, the kind of thinking increasingly important in our complex, digital present. Cultural awareness is boosted, as they learn about artistic expression down through time and around the world. 

Finally, time and again, studies have demonstrated a powerful link between the arts and other achievement. A report by Americans for the Arts found that children who do nine hours of art a week are four times more likely to be recognized for academic achievement, to enter a math or science fair, or win a writing award. And if that were not enough, art is simply fun. Thank you to Guild Hall for always being there for our kids.

Explanations vary about the cause of a storm of dust that flowed on and off in the past week into downtown Amagansett. The known source was a large farm field just beyond the north side of the municipal parking lot. According to the most common account, late rains messed up this year’s harvest on the field. Then the farmer who rents it was delayed in getting a cover crop down and geese gobbled up the seedlings. That may be so, but it does not account for dust having blown off the field in previous years or for similar dust-ups off Long Lane in East Hampton. Notably, much larger fields at Town Lane in Amagansett have not been affected in a similar situation.

Given alarm about past practices on farmland, a great deal of concern is warranted. Substances, both naturally occurring and manmade, have been found on other agricultural properties on the South Fork. Dust itself, even absent potential toxins, is a health risk, particularly for the elderly and young children who might live nearby or attend the school just down the road. 

To what extent a town or county legislative response is possible is unclear. For the most part, matters involving farming fall under the purview of state regulators. Compounding the confusion is a lawsuit filed by members of the Bistrian family, who own the land, seeking to force East Hampton Town to build a road over which a residential development they plan there would be reached. 

Another wrinkle is that the town owns a portion of the dust source, an inverted “L” reaching up like a woodstove chimney smack in the middle of the field, from the municipal parking lot to Windmill Lane. Over the years, town officials tried to buy the land for preservation, but the Bistrians rejected the offers as too low for land that is already divided on paper into about 10 separate buildable lots. The last time the parties were in active negotiation, the family felt the town was low-balling the potential purchase by at least $10 million. 

One solution that many Amagansett residents might not like is for the Bistrians’ residential development plan for the properties to go forward, with the town living up to its obligation to open a road, as promised, to Windmill Lane. If the remaining family owners are unhappy with the town’s offer, as we have noted before, property in the center of the Amagansett business district is not really the wrong location for a handful of new houses. At least lawns would not be likely to dry up and blow dust into houses and shops.

If the Amagansett dust bowl is in any way the result of the long impasse between the property owners and the town, no effort should be spared to force all the parties to a speedy resolution.