In what has been a quiet tradition for many years, the East Hampton Presbyterian Church has put on a free Thanksgiving dinner for anyone who wants to attend. This volunteer effort is but one of the good things that happen year round and give us a strong sense of pride in our community.

Not all good works emanate from our religious institutions, of course, but we were reminded of their central role, even now in the 21st century, after the shooting attack at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Five days after this tragedy, leaders of the houses of worship here gathered with public officials and a crowd numbering in the hundreds — more than the sanctuary could seat — at the Jewish Center of the Hamptons in a spirit of togetherness at which believers and nonbelievers alike felt welcomed and reassured. Perhaps the most moving moment was when 11 members of the East Hampton Clericus, from across faiths and denominations, lit candles, one for each victim.

That sense of fellowship, albeit at a far less painful time, can be found in the winter soup dinners at Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church’s Parish Hall. These gatherings, with soups donated by local restaurants, are free; the first of the season was held last night.

On Sunday, the community has again been invited to the Jewish Center of the Hamptons for an interfaith Thanksgiving service that the Rev. Leandra Lambert of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church will lead. Then, next Thursday, the interfaith dinner in the East Hampton Presbyterian Session House will take place from noon to 2:30 p.m. for those who may be alone, unable to cook, or simply wish to celebrate together with others. Then there are the volunteers who make this event and so much more in this small town happen. For them, the takeaway is a feeling of doing something good — and there is nothing better than that.

You know the feeling. You are walking along Main Street or Newtown Lane in East Hampton Village on a hot summer day and a cold blast of air slaps you in the face as you pass a boutique’s open door. Do you shiver and keep moving or are you drawn inside by the icy come-on?

The question could be moot soon: The village board is thinking about banning the energy-wasting practice of keeping doors open while cooling systems are operating. New York City passed a similar law in 2015. Exceptions in the Big Apple are made for restaurants with sidewalk dining, something that could be part of a local law. Property owners, commercial tenants, and the general public will have a chance to weigh in at a hearing for which a date will be set shortly. The law seems likely to pass; this is a village that recently took on plastic drinking straws and banned foam containers for take-out food.

Strict limits on the piles of free magazines that marred the business district will go into effect soon. At the same time, the village board is taking another hard look at noisy and polluting leaf blowers. It will also consider whether to join East Hampton and Southampton Towns in mandating nitrogen-reducing septic systems for new construction projects. Together, it is clear that officials are doing their part to improve the village’s environmental and quality of life stewardship.

Air-conditioning matters. The United States Energy Information Administration, a federal agency, estimates that air-conditioning accounts for about 17 percent of residential electricity spending. Houses with central air systems consume about twice the energy of households with window units. And home cooling in the U.S. releases about 117 million metric tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide each year.

Locally it is a big deal, too. PSEG-Long Island oversees the South Fork Peak Savers program in which ratepayers in Southampton and East Hampton Towns with central air systems can sign up to receive a free Nest brand remotely programmable thermostat; rebates of up to $500 are available for customers who already have a Nest or Honeywell Wi-Fi unit to control their home air-conditioning. Participants’ cooling settings can then be changed an imperceptible degree or two, maybe three, during the May-to-September cooling season when there is increased demand. A $25 per summer incentive is paid to participants in good standing, who will likely also have reductions in their power bills. (The incentive aspect of the program was misstated in an Oct. 24 editorial.)

From a macro point of view, the benefits are twofold: reducing demand on the electrical grid during the height of summer and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Many East Hampton Village residents are familiar with the dark smoke from the diesel “peaker” generators off Cove Hollow Road. We can assume that no small volume of those noxious fumes goes to power shops that keep their doors open wide. 

New York State and the Town of East Hampton are setting goals and taking steps to rely 100 percent on renewable energy as soon as possible. East Hampton Village can add to the momentum by continuing to insist that businesses can be, in effect, better citizens.

There is a sharp-edged irony about affordable work-force housing on the South Fork: The sector of the local economy most responsible for rent escalation — and the one with the most power to do something to counteract it — has done little or nothing to ease the situation. 

Real estate firms and their associated buyers, sellers, and builders have benefited eagerly over a long runup that has at the same time priced many local people and job seekers out of the market. The boom has created ever more demand for labor, in no small measure leading to the dreaded morning and evening “trade parades” of service and delivery personnel clogging roads at least as far west as Hampton Bays. And yet, living on the South Fork remains out of reach for many, leading to a hiring crisis — ask just about any employer how things are in this regard.

Looked at over the long term, East Hampton has been a standout in the state among small municipalities on affordable and mixed-income housing.  

Yet, from the perspective of those searching for a place to live, it could seem that there was little available; the town affordable housing waitlist is maxed out and closed to new applicants. This is how private effort could help, filling the often long gaps between new officially sponsored facilities, which can be as long as eight years.

Now and then there has been talk of a transfer tax, like the one that powers the community preservation fund, only for housing. As with the C.P.F., buyers would pay a small percentage over the cost of their real estate purchases and the money would flow into an account set aside for new affordable construction. This might sound like a good idea, but there are concerns. First, adding a new tax could scare away some buyers, although with the market continuing strong, that seems unlikely. 

Rather than tempt elected officials with another source of quote-unquote free money, sometimes used to help win votes and reward pet projects, the real estate industry here, from brokerages to contractors, might join together in a private initiative to build or rehab apartments and houses to help meet the need. This would not necessarily enrich those in the industry in a monetary way, but it would offer payback in the sense of a job well done for the community, something to crow about.

If a new industry-driven, public-private effort produced only a handful of units each year, it would make a difference. As we have seen, government can do this, too, but not as fast; there has been an almost-decade-long gap since the last major project opened its doors. It’s time the property professionals got involved in a big way.

Word that whales had been spotted off Amagansett and East Hampton earlier this week sent those who felt the magic to the beach. At Indian Wells shortly after dawn on Tuesday, cloudlike spouts could just be seen near the horizon. Sphere-shaped, the exhaled blows lingered in the air from a group of humpbacks, at least by one estimation. 

Adding to the mysteries of the ocean, what seems to have been a great white shark was observed attacking a large seal very near the shore in Montauk on Monday. This is something that plenty of surfers and others had assumed would eventually happen off Long Island, and a ripple of anxiety shuddered through that particular tribe. 

Thing is, great whites have been feeding for some time on seals along Cape Cod, so this should come as no surprise. Experts say that it should be seen as a sign of a healthy ecosystem: Were there not forage fish enough, the seals would not be here at all. Were there not seals, the “men in the gray suits,” as an old friend used to call them, would ply their trade elsewhere.

Time was that the people of East Hampton kept regular watch over the ocean for whales. When one was sighted, a flag went up and the villagers rallied to the beach, some to see, others to row out in small, fast boats with hope for a lucrative payday. Debts could be settled in whalebone or oil; the minister in the early colony might be paid that way, if providence shone. In 1675, the town fathers decided to suspend school during the whaling season, from January to April, so that every able-bodied hand was available to help with the trying-out of the oil.

Whaling here ended for good in 1918. The last one taken, a right whale, turned out to be of little commercial value. Now, although humpbacks seem in fine form, right whales are dwindling away, with around 400 individuals remaining in the North Atlantic. 

The scarcity of whales, combined with their size, make them a compelling curiosity when they are sighted. Herman Melville, among their greatest chroniclers, understood they signified something more. 

“ . . . [L]ulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it.”

As Melville knew, whales are symbols of the immensity of things we think exist but know almost nothing of and cannot explain. For a moment, sitting in our warm cars at the beach in winter, we, too, may get a glimpse of this truth.

What explains the criminal forgeries alleged last week against the former East Hampton Town Republican chairman and a leader of the local Independence Party is hard to pin down, but amid an atmosphere of overheated partisanship the matter is, sadly, not that much of a surprise.

The charges are easy to understand although the motivation for them is not as clear. According to Timothy Sini, the Suffolk district attorney, Amos Goodman, at the time the Republican leader, and Pat Mansir, a former East Hampton Town Board member and trustee, collectively forged at least 50 signatures on nominating petitions in advance of the special town board election in November. Mr. Goodman backed Lisa Larsen, but the party chose Manny Vilar as its standard-bearer; he eventually lost in a landslide to David Lys. 

Ms. Mansir was said to have broken the law while she was circulating a petition for David Gruber; though he got the Independence Party’s nod, he was dropped from the ballot after a state court justice found that the petitions were “replete with fraudulent dates and forged signatures and/or initials of signatories and/or subscribing witnesses.” Neither Mr. Gruber nor Ms. Larsen has been accused of wrongdoing.

So why did their backers supposedly commit felonies? In the quiet days of December it is difficult to remember the frenzy that led up, first, to a Democratic primary and then to the November vote. Charges and countercharges flew. The town Democrats split into factions, with Mr. Gruber’s side sticking to the low road and apparent all-out thirst to defeat Mr. Lys. Mr. Vilar’s chances were all but dashed in advance, if only to judge from his loss in a town supervisor bid the previous year. Amid all that — and the national picture of cheating, Russian involvement, and lack of compromise — perhaps a win-at-all costs mentality took hold.

Mr. Vilar is now the town Republican chairman, and if nothing else, his long career as a law enforcement officer and police union leader gives us more confidence that upcoming electioneering will be more orderly. As for the Independence Party’s prospects, its attraction always has had a lot to do with its outsider stance. Its chairwoman, Elaine Jones, who, among others, took the suspicions about Mr. Amos’s petitions to the district attorney, is in it for the long haul. 

As for the next election, all parties and their volunteers need to remember that trust in government is very fragile and that cheating not only diminishes the public’s confidence but can land the perpetrators in a whole lot of trouble.

East Hampton Village is about to jump on the water-quality train in a big way. After a discussion early this month, it was clear that the village board’s wait-and-see position on wastewater had gone on long enough and that it was ready to mandate low-nitrogen septic systems.

Elevated nitrogen levels are a cause of harmful algae blooms in fresh water and degradation of the marine ecosystem. That said, results of the few state tests of East End bays have been below the Peconic Estuary Program’s level of concern.

The Town of East Hampton led the way in 2017, requiring that modern waste disposal be mandated for new construction. Businesses that had failed to follow an Environmental Protection Agency rule on the elimination of cesspools were targeted. Upgrades also were part of the law, with penalties of up to $500 a day while a violation continued. Shortly after East Hampton anted up, Southampton passed a similar law targeting new houses, “major” upgrades, and increases of 25 percent or more of floor area in high-priority areas. 

Costs for the advanced, low-nitrogen wastewater systems can reach $20,000 for a house, with required annual maintenance on top of that. Rebates are available to help offset installation but not maintenance bills, with cash for the rebates coming from the community preservation fund, up to 20 percent annually. 

It is too early in the game to know if the modern systems, which cost more than traditional leaching pools, will result in demonstrable improvement of freshwater and marine ecosystems. This uncertainty comes from the lack of baseline studies of nitrogen levels, though some new studies are now underway. Given the lack of data, the program is really little more than a poorly designed experiment. Therefore, it is only fair that government provide subsidies in the form of the rebates. 

We remain concerned, however, about the community preservation fund being used on such a large scale for expensive technology that is untested. If East Hampton Village decides to sign on, it should seek a different funding source. Every dollar spent on unproven water quality projects is a dollar less for the fund’s original purpose — land and historic preservation. 

Nitrogen, this era’s environmental bete noire, also comes from road runoff, agriculture, lawn fertilizers, and atmospheric sources. Further limiting development in watersheds could well prove to be the most beneficial investment in the long run. About low-nitrogen systems, no one knows.

Six high-priority areas have been identified in Montauk for immediate water quality correction. Early this month, the East Hampton Town Board heard from its water quality advisory committee about projects to limit pollution in Lake Montauk and along the downtown ocean shore. These are welcome, important efforts.

Alarms had been raised by the closing of the South Lake Drive bathing beach because of bacterial contamination as well as the results of ongoing tests sponsored by Concerned Citizens of Montauk and the Surfrider Foundation. In the C.C.O.M.-Surfrider reports, fecal bacteria had routinely been found at levels harmful to human health. This level also was reported from an outfall pipe near the Atlantic Terrace resort. 

Most immediately, the town will seek to install antimicrobial filters to reduce the threat coming from the end of the drainpipe at Surfside Place. At the same time, it will begin looking for ways to intercept groundwater traveling from the Ditch Plain neighborhood toward the lake. Bioswales, or rain gardens, may soon appear along West Lake Drive and an underground barrier may be installed near Duryea Avenue. 

Officials might have been slow on the uptake in the past because the water tests had been conducted outside their supervision, but it is hard to argue credibly against the data. Year in and year out, the groups have identified trouble spots with remarkable consistency. To us, the town’s willingness to look at the numbers — and try to do something about them — is a terrific example of a public-private win.

Having demonstrated by his surprise victory that the electorate as a whole is not able to ensure that a president is up to the task, it now is Congress’s job to rein in presidential power, if it can. One need look no further back than Christmas Eve, when President Donald Trump’s questioning staff about whether he could fire the chairman of the Federal Reserve took the Dow down about 3 percent in one day. 

Wall Street’s ups and downs notwithstanding, the fact that the president’s musings could cause share prices to tank shows that there is too much resting on a single person’s shoulders. Along the same lines, that a president could alone order the withdrawal of troops from a war zone — or their going in — presents far too great a risk for international stability. The consequences of an unhinged president ordering a nuclear strike on a foreign country are almost beyond comprehension.

Americans have gotten used to an imperial presidency, even if there was tension about it at the start. George Washington set the tone in 1796, when he chose not to seek a third term. Yet it was not until the 22nd Amendment was ratified in 1951 that the two-term limit was official.

The authors of the Constitution placed the sole right to declare war in Congress, but from Theodore Roosevelt onward, presidents have gained power, particularly overseas. With the start of the Cold War in the late 1940s, more authority has shifted to the White House, even in times of peace. The historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. observed, “by the early 1970s the American president had become on issues of war and peace the most absolute monarch (with the possible exception of Mao Tse-tung of China) among the great powers of the world.”

The 9/11 attacks pushed presidential power to an even-greater level, resulting in warrantless searches, terrorist suspects tortured in secret prisons, and a largely unsupervised global war on terror, which began under George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney and expanded under President Obama. Even now, for good or ill, most of the country’s regulations come not from the states but are controlled by the president.

Congress has not seemed eager to put the executive branch back into its intended coequal constitutional box. This may have a lot to do with the Oval Office’s influence on fund-raising, making the individual politicians dependent on a president’s good will. This, as the historian Eric Posner has pointed out, has “given the president various blank checks to regulate.”

He and others have argued that the fix will not come from Congress, nor the courts, nor the states because the complexity and speed of national affairs and a volatile economy require an effective executive. That has left the party system, the media, and the internet, and, by extension, the people, the only remaining check on presidential power, which, in the end, is what the founders intended. That is not an excuse for Congress to punt; each senator and representative must be willing to look past his or her personal ambition and ask himself or herself if an unbridled presidency is worth the chaos it creates.

It is little surprise that the Trump administration is giving the go-ahead to renewed fossil fuel exploration in the Atlantic. What is hard to imagine is the potential environmental cost from both drilling and the seismic tests to determine where to drill.

Five companies recently were authorized to begin looking. They are to search from Delaware to Florida using powerful blasts to probe the seafloor. One respected marine environmental group has said the noise is so loud that it can be heard up to 2,500 miles away. And the work could continue around the clock for months, harming dolphins, the critically endangered right whale, and many less charismatic marine species. Studies from Duke University and the University of North Carolina indicated that fish had fled an artificial reef during seismic testing. How long it took them to return was unclear.

Beyond the immediate effect of the tests, they are but a precursor to oil and gas extraction, something opposed by nearly every sitting East Coast governor, as well as thousands of other officials, including the town boards of Southampton and East Hampton. Representative Lee Zeldin said he, too, opposes seismic tests.

Despite all this, the administration is undeterred. It may be that this will be settled in the courts. A host of environmental and fishing groups have filed suit. Let us hope they prevail.

One, two, three: The Village of East Hampton took on paper waste, plastic straws, and smoking in public in a single morning. The proposed measures are ambitious and worthy of support, even if enforcement turns out to be a bit tricky.

The broadest of the three would prohibit smoking and the use of e-cigarettes or vaping devices on public property in the village. This would cover some streets, sidewalks, parking lots, parks, and beaches. A smoking ban has been in effect in Herrick Park and the Main Beach Pavilion for some time; this would go a lot further. A ban would cut down on the cigarette butts that often foul sidewalks, but more than that, it would be a strong and more important message that smoking is harmful. How nice it will be not to have the acrid stink of a cigar wafting down the beach on an otherwise perfect day.

The village board is likely to join the anti-plastic straw wave, too, with a rule that would prohibit restaurants from placing them in drinks unless asked for by patrons. Activists concede that plastic straws are an almost infinitesimal part of the unnecessary consumption of fossil fuels and cause of global pollution, but, they say, banning them is as good a place to start as any. The village had already prohibited the use of foam takeout containers. Cutting down on plastic straws is a sensible next step.

Last and most complex among the proposals coming up for public hearing tomorrow is a village law that would classify the free magazines that choke the business district as garbage unless distributed according to strict rules. This would put the summer glossies, in particular those piled in front of stores, in the same category as household waste and construction debris. Free magazines would be allowed only with the permission of the property owner or tenant and they would have to be secured, although they could be handed out to passers-by. Those placing magazines on public or private property without permission would be subject to a penalty and the offending items removed. 

Each proposal is a worthy one. Taken together, they might go a long way toward making the village streets, parks, storefronts, and beaches more presentable, the air cleaner, and lessen the village contribution to the plastic waste stream.