No indication has been forthcoming about what caused the deaths of three, possibly four, dolphins found washed ashore along the ocean here and another discovered in distress in Three Mile Harbor. Whether or not a definitive cause of death is determined, the fact that several dolphins ended up separately over a relatively wide stretch of the East Hampton coastline in the space of a few days is cause for concern. 

Dolphins, like other marine mammals, are protected by federal law. They were here frequently during the summer, feeding on schools of menhaden, or bunker, often very close to shore. Chasing bait along the beach could have had something to do with the recent deaths; speculation among some observers has centered on commercial gill-netters, who have been working in the area in recent years. However, simple proximity does not make a case, and it would be wise to wait for an official report.

All may not be as fine in the ocean here as it appears. Humpback whales also were spotted during a several-week period this summer, feeding, like the dolphins, on the bunker schools. In the frenzy, some people saw nature’s miracle, signs of health and abundance. However, that may well have been wrong, at least as far as the whales are concerned.

According to researchers, disruptions among prey species in the Gulf of Maine caused by rapidly warming ocean water have forced hungry whales to migrate away from their usual feeding areas. These movements have put them increasingly at risk of strikes by ships. 

The critically endangered right whale population has lost 15 of its approximately 450 remaining individuals since April. Other kinds of whales suffered as well — including 53 humpbacks known to have died in about a year and a half, which the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration described as an “unusual mortality event.” A depressing account appeared in a recent Science section of The New York Times, linking shifts in the food that whales depend on to increased accidental killings.

Now it appears that the whales, which thrilled many South Fork beachgoers this summer, might have been a sign of a planet out of balance. The dolphins’ appearance here does not seem right, either. We may never know what caused their deaths, but it should remind us to keep a close eye on the sea — and to continue to press for action to reverse the climate trends that are putting both humankind and the wild world at risk.

A stunning juncture occurred Tuesday afternoon when Representative Lee Zeldin broke with the Trump administration over links between the president’s family and individuals with ties to the Russian government who were thought to have damaging information about Hillary Clinton. 

Following the release of an email chain in which the Russian connection was made clear, Mr. Zeldin’s remark, on Twitter, called a meeting that Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, attended a “big no-no.”

In an email, the younger Mr. Trump was told that “high level and sensitive information” came from “Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

“If it’s what you say I love it,” the younger Mr. Trump responded.

Mr. Zeldin’s reaction is especially notable because he was among the first members of Congress to endorse Donald J. Trump’s bid for the Republican nomination.

As more has become known about the emails and the meeting that followed, a number of political and law enforcement observers have said the right thing for Donald Trump Jr. to have done was to alert the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which he did not do. 

As a lawyer who served in the Army in the Judge Advocate General Corps, Mr. Zeldin would seem to know damning evidence when he hears it. As a stalwart supporter of the Trump candidacy, he was able to countenance hateful and divisive rhetoric, so his recent turnabout is remarkable. It is interesting to realize that, though Mr. Zeldin was early to join the Trump camp, he also seems quicker on the trigger than many of his fellow Republicans in Congress to have begun to turn on the Trumps.

Breitbart News, the arch-right website, helped set the tone some years ago when it posted a story headlined “Ten Reasons Why People Who Support Wind Farms Are Deluded, Criminal or Insane.” Brietbart is not alone; opposition to wind power is common among many on the right, who cite turbines’ wildlife-killing blades as a top concern, though at the same time they back gutting the Endangered Species Act and dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency. We noticed an op-ed this week in Newsday from a right-wing think tank decrying turbines’ blinking red lights at night and “harmful” noise levels. Would that were all we had to worry about as the planet rapidly warms.

Locally, it is difficult to figure out just which constituency here in East Hampton some Republican leaders and the party’s candidates for town board and trustee are trying to woo in their opposition to an offshore turbine project that would help meet Long Island’s growing power needs. Their statements against it may appeal to a certain pro-fossil fuel far-right audience, but at a time when the risks from anthropogenic climate change are becoming clearer, especially on the highly vulnerable East End, they risk being out of step with the times.

There is an extraordinary amount of negative nonsense out there about wind power. Opponents, many backed by the oil industry, say it is expensive or harmful or that it can change the climate itself. In fact, as far as electricity production goes, wind is competitively priced and has near-zero carbon emissions. Looking to the future, it is obvious that as fossil fuel supplies are used up, there will be more call for alternatives. Wind must be part of a shift to renewable energy if greenhouse gases are going to be controlled.

Certainly, concerns among inshore and offshore fishing interests about the placement of wind turbines and the delivery cables to land are legitimate and must be weighed. Deepwater Wind has proposed its offshore project in what is traditionally a productive fishing area; that may have to change. Also, the company may have to drop its original plan for an underwater transmission line in Gardiner’s Bay. Any flaws in its specific proposals, however, should not be allowed to subsume the general notion that reducing global warming will take an “all-of-the-above” approach, including a significant commitment to offshore wind.

A minor accident in which a Bridgehampton fire truck responding to a call struck a passenger car near the intersection of Montauk Highway and Sagg Road on Monday should be a reminder to all motorists here to yield to emergency vehicles. It is not obvious from what we know so far who was at fault in the incident, but no one was hurt. Nonetheless, that something like this could involve so visible a piece of fire equipment suggests that other vehicles, like the personal ones used by fire and emergency medical volunteers to respond to a call, are less visible still.

Readers of The Star, we assume, know the meaning of the blue or green lights that signify a volunteer on his or her way to an emergency. Visitors accustomed to only official fire and E.M.S. vehicles may be mystified. The rule is that a driver should pull to the side of the road when one of these vehicles approaches; in reality this does not happen often enough.

Local officials have to think hard about how to get the word out. One obvious idea would be to place road signs reminding motorists to move right when they encounter a vehicle bearing a blue or green flashing light, as well as clear the way for marked ambulances and fire trucks. But that may not be enough. Luckily, social media and online advertising could be brought to bear. It would not be all that difficult — or expensive — for towns and fire districts to buy advertising space targeting searches such as “East Hampton vacation rentals” or “best Hamptons restaurants” to reach the transient audience. And posting on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook is free. All it will take is a little creative thinking.

No one method is going to be effective with everyone who uses the South Fork’s too-busy roads, but that is no excuse for officials not to try every tool at their disposal. Lives are, quite actually, at stake.

A recent P.S.A. from LTV

A recent analysis by a private group has found that human and animal wastes were reaching the South Fork’s bays, beaches, and harbors at an alarming rate. The eastern Long Island chapter of the Surfrider Foundation took data taken from its Blue Water Task Force project and from the Concerned Citizens of Montauk and looked for trends. What it found should be alarming to anyone who cares about clean water and a productive environment.

The single worst spot identified in the Surfrider three-year look-back was in downtown Montauk, where a pipe placed by the United States Army Corps of Engineers through its sandbag seawall was found to have fecal bacteria in excess of a federal health standard 70 percent of the time it was tested. Parts of Lake Montauk exceeded the standard around half the time, as did the Georgica Pond access on Montauk Highway and Pussy’s Pond in Springs. Fresh Pond in Amagansett is another trouble spot.

New water quality improvement efforts are only in the planning stages. If the C.C.O.M.-Surfrider tests show anything at all, it is that existing measures are incapable of stopping the troubling flow. Both organizations are to be highly commended for pointing out just how much work remains to be done.

East Hampton is in a crisis in which young adults, year-round workers, and ordinary residents struggle to find adequate housing they can afford. But the most recent town board discussion about housing involved temporary, portable units intended for Montauk’s seasonal, resort work force. Taking the proposal seriously is an unfortunate case of skewed priorities.

The median price for a house in East Hampton Town was a near-record $1.1 million in the first quarter of this year — four times the national average. That figure is the highest on the East End, and far beyond the means of most wage earners here. At the same time year-round rentals are few and expensive — with the supply being further limited by the astonishing growth of Airbnb and other online vacation accommodation services. 

For many, the lack of housing here leaves few choices. Those with jobs can stay with family or friends, find a reasonably priced illegal rental, travel daily to East Hampton from points west with commutes of up to an hour and a half when traffic is bad — or leave the area. Telecommuting is an option for some, but it is simply not viable as a long-term strategy, especially for those in the construction and service industries. Ask anyone who runs a business with midlevel, technically skilled, or management vacancies how hiring is going, and you will get a very discouraging picture. 

It is disappointing that the town board would spend its time on portable housing for seasonal workers, as it did on July 11. An owner of a trendy Montauk restaurant, the Grey Lady, took the concept to the board. Besides running the restaurant, Ryan Chadwick has a start-up that would provide modular, self-contained units on wheels that could be hauled away at the end of the season. There is sharp irony here — the tiny houses would go away just like the restaurant’s profits, its payments to food suppliers, and the lion’s share of the money paid to summertime staff. 

What makes Mr. Chadwick’s idea more troubling is that it would do nothing about unsafe and overcrowded low-end housing in Montauk unless there were an equal commitment on the town’s part to crack down on workers’ share houses and rundown motels occupied by the seasonal labor force. 

If anything, the town board should make housing for East Hampton’s existing residents and their young-adult children a priority. Officials should focus on our year-round commercial sector before responding to seasonal businesses of dubious local economic importance — many of which have brought problems upon themselves by expanding to require staff beyond those available locally.  In this, the town is complicit by failing to enforce effective limits on seating, in particular on bar and outdoor guest capacity. 

Real and lasting answers to East Hampton’s housing crisis are needed. Pop-up portable units for transitory laborers should not be even a small part of the solution.

If your garden is anything like that of a friend of ours, your status with the neighbors, who often receive its ever-increasing overage, must be skyrocketing. This summer has produced one of the most bountiful home vegetable harvests in years, and the wonder is that it’s happening after an unusually cold spring, with temperatures in the 50s halfway into June. 

June was so cold, in fact, that memories of sixth-grade history lessons about 1816, the Year Without a Summer (also known as Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death), returned to haunt the chilly nights. But then came deliverance, a seemingly endless succession of glorious sunny days, with just enough rain in between to postpone that purchase of an automated sprinkler system for yet another year. 

Whether or not it was the climactic heaves that did it, our friend’s beefsteak and heirloom tomatoes, which barely staggered into September last year, overran their supports in mid-July; only a quick run to the hardware store for more stakes has saved the floppers from certain death-by-bug. They aren’t quite ready yet — the late start did take some toll — but the little Sungolds are showing color, and another week in the 80s should more than do it for the big ones. That first tomato — with “its remarkable amplitude and abundance, no pit, no husk, no leaves or thorns,” as the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda puts it, really is the “star of earth.”

As for all the other supernumeraries — eggplants, peppers, beets, lettuce, arugula, zucchini, cucumbers (Aaargh, six more Kirbies after a good rain, hiding under that big leaf!) — nothing to do but drop them on nearby doorsteps, maybe with a brief note: “Kindly do right by these orphans of the storm.”

Things move fast these days, so fast, in fact, that Americans are getting accustomed to radical change almost overnight. The country’s lightning speed acceptance of same-sex marriage is one recent example of how public opinion can shift in what seems an instant. 

In that context it is interesting to think about suffrage and the struggle for the right of women to vote. Today, at a time when one of the leading advocates for the disenfranchisement of Americans of color enjoys a prominent role in the Trump administration, the fight for access to the fundamental act of democracy continues.

Locally, we have the League of Women Voters of the Hamptons to thank for keeping voting rights front and center. Today, at 2 p.m., members and supporters are to march along Main Street after gathering at a house where May Groot Manson, a suffrage leader, once lived. The league event will commemorate an early suffrage rally that took place on the Village Green in 1913 — four years before women gained the vote in New York State.

It is unthinkable today that women, more than half the adult population of the United States then and now, could have been denied a role in choosing elected officials. Yet today, many states engage in gerrymandering intended to block black and Latino voters from having an effective voice in government. 

As bad, the Trump administration has set a path toward wholesale purges baldly focused on getting people of color off voting rolls. 

The administration’s point man on this is Kris Kobach, who has headed voter suppression efforts in his home state of Kansas targeting young and/or black citizens more likely to vote Democratic and has said that he does not believe that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in the 2016 presidential election. Despite his claim, there is no evidence by several orders of magnitude for anywhere near the 2.8 million votes needed for Mr. Trump’s favorite voter-fraud conspiracy theory to be true. 

A White House commission Mr. Kobach leads also touched off controversy earlier this summer when it requested a massive harvest of personal data on the nation’s voters from state election officials, something even some Republicans objected to.

At the same time, the Jim Crow laws that were purged during the civil rights era have been replaced with the mass incarceration of black American men, which has been rightly called suppression in another guise. It is as if he, and those Republicans who think like the president, truly fear democracy.

As we celebrate women’s gaining the right to vote a century ago, we must never forget that the struggle for equal access to the polls continues. White supremacists have marched in Charlottesville and elsewhere, and as they take to the streets with the effective blessing of the president, the fight goes on. Now as much as ever.

There is painful irony to the message that President Trump delivered Friday in Brentwood. Speaking to a group of police that included members of all of the East End departments, Mr. Trump ostensibly addressed the violent MS-13 gang. But he also told the officers and assembled police brass that they should feel free to rough up suspects. A White House spokeswoman has said that he intended the off-script comment as a joke. If it were a joke, it showed unfathomable insensitivity; if Ms. Trump was being serious, it showed what seems like criminal depravity.

Violent encounters with law enforcement are nothing new. In some situations, they are an unavoidable aspect of the job. But what is entirely unacceptable is for the president of the United States to promote the unlawful treatment of people in police custody. By doing that he placed himself among a regrettable fraternity of the world’s repressive leaders, including President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, whom he is said to admire, and Turkey’s dictatorial President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who had a warm welcome in the Trump White House.

We find hope in the fact that many officers and police brass who reacted to Mr. Trump’s speech were alarmed. Though some in law enforcement here have been hesitant to speak out publicly, others, including the Boston, Los Angeles, and New York Police Departments, have issued statements reiterating their positions on the use of excessive force and decrying the president’s remarks.

At a moment when U.S. police have come under scrutiny for the shooting deaths of unarmed civilians, it is counterproductive for the president to condone violence. This is one reason why so many departments spoke out in opposition so quickly. Policing is difficult work. It should not have been made more difficult, especially among communities of color, by a thoughtless president’s incendiary remarks.

Last week’s revelations in a lawsuit brought by a former East Hampton Village police chief and his wife bring to light the distasteful truth that some local officials have long traded their influential positions for lucrative side businesses. 

It is no secret that Jerry Larsen, the former chief who is now a candidate for the East Hampton Town Board, has for years had a security business, though since about 2009 he has insisted the business was his wife’s, Lisa Larsen’s, not his. That is splitting hairs; he always remained a company officer, and it is clear that it was at least a joint effort.

Starting in 2005, Mr. Larsen ran Protec Security Services, which eventually got into the fire and burglar alarm business, as well as offered drug tests and estate watching. Trouble started when Protec began to compete with Scan Security, which employed Village Mayor Paul F. Rickenbach Jr. as an alarm salesman, the suit claims.

The Larsens say Mr. Rickenbach and Richard Lawler, a village trustee who had his own house-watching business, then took advantage of a section of the village ethics code to block Protec from taking on private clients within village limits as a way to limit competition and get more business for themselves. 

The village ethics code, in place since 2002, prohibits any officer or employee from accepting outside jobs or providing services that would create a conflict with his or her official duties — and that would have included the police chief. Mr. Larsen’s excuse, as described in the suit, is basically that everybody was doing it. Mr. Rickenbach and Mr. Lawler have not responded to the claims. 

The matter speaks volumes about Mr. Larsen’s character, in what can only be seen as unflattering terms. In his lawsuit, and without apparent irony, Mr. Larsen says he is trying to “hold those in power accountable for their actions.”

Rules barring this kind of outside employment were in place before Mr. Larsen became police chief. Even if he had some doubt about them, common sense might have suggested that he should not have sought a $300,000-a-year security contract at an unnamed village resident’s property while heading the village police force. 

After Mr. Larsen’s retirement in January, he took a job as head of security at the billionaire Ronald Perelman’s Creeks estate, which is in the village. Mr. Perelman was recently turned down by the village board in his bid for a new zoning classification that would have made certain problems with structures built without proper approvals at the Creeks go away.

If the allegations in the suit hold up, Mayor Rickenbach and Mr. Lawler may deserve even greater rebuke than Mr. Larsen for outright abuse of their positions for personal gain. When he went away on vacation, Mr. Rickenbach would ask various village employees to cover his up to 60 private customers for him, the suit alleges. This included asking Mr. Larsen to do so. The suit also alleges that the mayor used a village vehicle while making rounds for his personal clients, as did Mr. Lawler. The charge that they used their posts to hamper Protec is a serious one. If true, these officials have shown very bad judgment, if not serious ethical violations. 

But it is very surprising that Mr. Larsen is bringing this suit now, with the town board election about two months away. This would hardly seem the time to raise clear-cut ethical issues in which he himself is implicated. Voters might well remember this case come Election Day.