The world may be undergoing a sixth great wave of extinctions, as recently examined in a book by Elizabeth Kolbert, and this phenomenon may well extend to the seas, including those off our own shores. Symptoms include coral reef degradation, finfish population crashes, toxic algae blooms, and the slow loss of once-familiar and economically vital species. New York State has responded by drafting a 10-year Ocean Action Plan, but the document, while extensive, offers no source for the money needed to address its ambitious goals.

New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation is accepting written responses to the draft until March 9. Hearings at which the public can comment in person will be held on Tuesday at Operation Splash in Freeport and next Thursday at the Long Beach Public Library.

Though billed as a plan for the state’s ocean waters, the draft’s authors describe an integrated ecosystem that extends from upland watersheds to streams and brackish estuaries, into inshore bays and harbors, and then to the Atlantic itself. In this vast and varied environment, the authors set 61 goals for ensuring ecological integrity and sustainable development, avoiding commercial exploitation, and responding to climate change while involving the public in decision-making.

The missing funding is no minor matter. New York’s budget for the environment has been gutted at a time when pressures on it from all sides have multiplied. Among the projects contained in the draft for which money has yet to be set aside are removing impediments that block fish spawning runs, controlling pesticide runoff, and evaluating sewage outfalls. Determining the cause and what can be done about plummeting lobster catches is also on the list, as is a study to understand the impact of ocean acidification on shellfish.

Also on the to-do list, but not yet paid for, are a study of winter flounder declines, deep-water coral and sponge management, a study of seabirds, a baseline ocean monitoring system for the New York Bight, removal of marine debris, and better dredging oversight, as well as public education. One key area for which money is needed is an effort to update local planning practices to include coastal resiliency strategies to minimize the impacts of extreme weather events and sea-level rise.

Key tasks for which money has only partially been secured involve reducing the accidental bycatch of marine mammals, turtles, sea birds, and the endangered Atlantic sturgeon, for one. A horseshoe crab study needs more funding, as does work on underwater noise. The 18 areas the report’s authors consider already paid for tend in most cases to be more advisory than actually occurring. The heavy lifting on saving the marine environment has yet to be done.

The failure to find the needed money cannot be put onto the Ocean Action Plan’s authors. Rather, it is the responsibility of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and the State Legislature. As the threat of climate change increases and coastal development continues without adequate restraint, the will must be found in Albany to do more. A strong public outcry that the Ocean Action Plan must be made a priority for New York would help.

Town officials have struck the right balance in deciding in whose interest the East Hampton Airport and the skies for miles around it will be managed.

After years, if not decades, of deference to commercial demands, the town board last week proposed tough rules that put residents first. Board members, especially Coucilwoman Kathee Burke-Gonzalez, who spearheaded a monumental effort, deserve gratitude. Thanks comes not only from the immediate community but from the many thousands of people who live in the North and South Forks’ other towns and villages and have had to put up with aircraft noise for far too long.

East Hampton’s proposed solutions center on strict limits on when loud aircraft can land and take off, and how often. The noisier ones, including almost all makes and models of United States-certified helicopters, would be banned from the airport between 8 p.m. and 9 a.m. year round. Helicopters, except those summoned for emergencies, would be prohibited from May 1 through September, while other aircraft classified as noisy would be banned from noon Thursday through noon Monday and limited to a single trip per week during the high season. A hearing on the rules is planned for March 5 at LTV Studios in Wainscott.

Perhaps the most notable aspect of all this is that the voices of protest and threat of legal action have come almost exclusively from those with a financial stake in maintaining unlimited access to the airport. The private, recreational pilots who had, perhaps reflexively, opposed anything having to do with meaningful noise controls have for the most part seen the light — and a common enemy in the for-profit helicopter companies. As for all the well-heeled passengers who fly in on all those leather-seated noisemakers, cold drinks in hand? No one has heard a peep from them so far.

Expect the legal fight over the new limits to be long, hard, and expensive. East Hampton Town officials should proceed with confidence, knowing that residents here and across the East End have their backs.

Attention in Albany may be focused on the apparent downfall of the Legislature’s top Democrat, Sheldon Silver, in a corruption scandal that cuts very close to Gov. Andrew Cuomo, but the critically important work of settling a budget for the coming fiscal year goes on. Two recent reports from the New York Department of Environmental Conservation have raised valid questions about the agency’s capabilities where wildlife is concerned and painted a picture of it as a failed agency.

The most disturbing report came at the end of the year and said that without aggressive action as many as 186 animal species could be imperiled in the state within 10 years. The other described the state’s ocean and estuary waters as in a state of crisis and said greater efforts were necessary to head off human impact, habitat degradation, and climate change. Sadly, Mr. Cuomo’s budget offers little in the way of good news in these regards. The D.E.C. simply needs a lot more money right away and perhaps a top-to-bottom redesign for the long haul. Here’s why.

The D.E.C. manages a huge range of properties, including about 4.5 million acres of land, more than 300 boat launching and fishing sites, 102 flood-control structures, 52 campgrounds, 12 fish hatcheries, 4 camps, 2 environmental education centers, and 1 tree nursery. That’s just the hardware.

On the program side, the agency oversees coastal projects, pollution control, hunting, fishing, mining, oil extraction, air quality, and even runs what amounts to its own armed police force. In Mr. Cuomo’s budget for the coming fiscal year, funding for the D.E.C. is increased by an insignificant 1.2 percent to $898 million. The spending plan’s priorities, too, seem out of touch, with the focus on industrial site cleanups, oil spill preparedness, farmland preservation in the Southern Tier and Hudson Valley, parks infrastructure, and public access. Needed or not, the budget also includes $50 million for improvements at the state fairgrounds outside Syracuse. Remember, this is at a time when the agency’s staffing levels are down about 10 percent from their peak and funding off by nearly a quarter from that of pre-Great Recession days.

For those concerned with wildlife, visiting migratory species, and marine ecosystems, there is little to be happy about in the near-term D.E.C. budget. Looking further out, things do not get much better. Capital spending increases slightly for 2016, then begins to fall off in subsequent years. The Environmental Protection Fund, which is supposed to help pay for critical habitat preservation and other programs, will see a modest increase of $10 million, which is far from enough.

That the D.E.C. is overtasked is clear, and the vast span of its responsibilities can lead to some peculiar conflicts. For example, it is both the lead agency for the Army Corps’s downtown Montauk erosion-control project and the regulator of the sand mines from which the raw material for the project will be dug. It was little surprise that the D.E.C. declared that the Montauk plan could go ahead without formal environmental review.

Breaking up the D.E.C. into several parts might be the best hope for the New York environment. In one scenario, one might think of one division as a regulatory agency concerned with pollution, extractive industries, and human health. Another might be responsible for activities such as hunting and fishing. And a third, and perhaps most important, would concentrate on the state’s wildlife and wild places.

As the two troubling reports indicate, the D.E.C. that New York has now is just not working.

Officials in the East End towns and villages are taking a new look at water pollution and suggesting that a regional approach might be the solution. They have proposed seeking as much as $100 million from the state for rebates on private septic systems or tax credits, acknowledging that environmental damage from failed or inadequate systems is a problem that spans municipal borders.

There have been other efforts too, and they are welcome. Suffolk County has initiated a test of new and improved nitrogen-removal units for home effluent. East Hampton Town is deep into a wastewater study of its own. The Town of Southampton has been an early leader, helping secure $2 million for a Stony Brook University program to develop new, effective wastewater systems.

The main problem with household and commercial wastewater, as well as fertilizer runoff, is its elevated nitrogen and phosphorus content. Both are essential elements, but when levels are too high, the environmental consequences are significant. They can cause harmful algae blooms, like those linked to shellfish collapses in the Peconic Estuary, and bacteria that can cause illness in humans.

Nitrogen is also seen as a leading cause of so-called dead zones, coastal areas where oxygen levels are so low that almost nothing can survive. This is known as hypoxia, and it has been identified as a culprit in the nearly complete loss of the essential eelgrass habitat in most East End bays and harbors. Perhaps less well understood, but of potentially massive impact, are changes in the oceans’ nitrogen cycle, which have the potential to alter the marine environment on a global scale. We are, in short, killing the seas with every flush.

Enhanced treatment of wastewater is seen as the solution. But improved septic systems can be prohibitively expensive for homeowners, and competing demands for funding are a constant for the operators of municipal sewage treatment plants. A recent study in East Hampton Town alone found at least 1,700 individual septic systems in need of correction and that number is likely to climb when examination of additional watershed properties is completed. The cost to retrofit a single private system to curb nitrogen and phosphorus could be as much as $40,000, according to the study’s author.

One idea for dealing with wastewater pollution has been to take money from the community preservation fund. As we have argued before, this should be a last resort. History has shown that when public officials begin to dip into dedicated funds, they will seek to raid them again and again for all manner of purposes. Think of former East Hampton Town Supervisor Bill McGintee’s bleeding of the C.P.F. to secretly balance the town’s budget, and Suffolk Executive Steve Bellone’s refusal to repay money owed to the county’s drinking water protection program.

The 2-percent C.P.F. tax on real estate transactions should remain out of bounds, and alternate funding found. Tapping the preservation fund for septic system rebates, which could have the unintended effect of increasing residential density by reducing groundwater contamination on individual sites, would be a net loss for the region. On the flip side, using C.P.F. money to buy land and prevent development in important watersheds, as East Hampton has done around Lake Montauk, for example, is the right approach.

Because East Hampton’s wastewater consultant also sells name-brand septic upgrade equipment, we have to wonder about his advice against hoping for money from state or federal sources to fight water pollution. On the contrary, while East End town and village officials should seek to fund interim work at home, we believe a collective effort to obtain state and federal funding is warranted.

The East Hampton Town Board should look beyond an apparent impasse on the airport’s budget and finance advisory subcommittee, which has stymied a financial review of planned limits on the noisiest kinds of aircraft.

By all appearances, the problem is a manufactured one in which some members of the subcommittee, those aligned with aviation interests, deliberately derailed the calculations in an effort to depict the proposed changes as costly to taxpayers. In fact, according to other members, the group tried to accommodate the dissenters’ demands for a minority report, among other things. However, when it became clear to the aviation side that a separate analysis would have had to be based on massaged assumptions that would not stand up under scrutiny, they just walked away from the process altogether.

As if on cue Tuesday, a lawyer hired by some of the helicopter companies that stand to lose a lucrative East Hampton route issued a statement. In it, he mischaracterized the deadlock, which, he said, “confirms the true economic hazards of the plan.” But this claim was based on no numbers whatsoever and should be suspect anyway, considering the source.

What is known and was previously acknowledged by the subcommittee as a whole is that the town’s plan to sharply limit helicopter flights would not result in financial Armageddon. In fact, the subcommittee told the town board late last year that fees would cover the expenses of running the airport and that long-term bonds could still be issued to pay for improvements.

One wild card described in that initial report, and repeated this week, was that legal challenges to new restrictions were likely and could be substantial. However, it is safe to say that town residents would be willing to shoulder the costs of litigation if quieter skies were the ultimate goal, and that the money need not come entirely from airport receipts.

In advance of a hearing on the proposed restrictions to begin this afternoon at LTV Studios in Wainscott, the East Hampton Town Board should not be dissuaded from the path it has set toward meaningful reduction in the number and frequency of the noisiest aircraft. This latest objection is just noise of a different sort.

Among the wild-eyed robins feeding in a holly bush outside our office window this week we spotted a cedar waxwing. A well-dressed fellow, he perched in sharp contrast to the tatty-looking, larger robins pulling greedily at the red berries. Below his buff-colored shoulders, two white lines, like pinstripes, ran down toward his tail. The pointed tuft atop his head stood crisp and proud.

Winter brings birds close. Those berries, less desirable perhaps than were available when the weather was better, are good enough. For the waxwing and his companions, the robins, they were worth sticking around for despite the faces at the window, looking outward in wonderment.

What to do about large commercial vehicles left overnight on residential properties has plagued Town Hall going back to the Wilkinson administration. Now, after protracted discussions among town board members and various segments of the public, a more or less reasonable policy appears near. The process of working out some new limits on trucks has been conducted with respect for all sides and a minimum of personal distraction, and this speaks well of the tenor of the town board as now configured.

Let us say first, that our own view regarding truck parking differs from that of those who have said these commercial vehicles are unwelcome neighbors and hurt property values. For us, the real issue is whether a property is wrongly used as a place of business, not what is parked there. As East Hampton Town Councilman Fred Overton said recently, many of the people who own these trucks are the same people who answer ambulance calls or put out fires. For some, he said, holding down more than one job, often one that requires a sizable vehicle, may be the only way to make ends meet.

Then, too, East Hampton has a long tradition of working people keeping the tools of their trade at home. Think of commercial trap fishermen who store nets and long wooden stakes in their yards. To say that house lots are not the place for parking or stockpiling much other than a family’s personal vehicles runs counter to that tradition. Sterile suburbia, we’d like to think, is still someplace way west of the Shinnecock Canal.

In a community where so much of the economic base comes from people who work in the trades, be it carpentry, landscaping, house painting, pool care, or a host of other jobs, it is unfortunate that some residents sound as if they are willing to hurt others. Also unfortunate would be the chance that the new rules could give an additional advantage to the large contracting firms, which are more likely to already have their own appropriate sites for parking.

In its recent revision of the draft ordinance the town board narrows in on the problem. The law would ban vehicles with a gross vehicle weight rating of 12,000 pounds or greater, with an 18-month phase-out period for locally licensed professionals who own vehicles up to a 14,000-pound weight rating. Pickup trucks would be exempt. All others that exceed the maximum figure would have to be parked on a commercial property. This would effectively remove box trucks, larger panel vans, delivery vehicles, and most dump trucks from residential areas except when they are on a job.

Banning commercial vehicle parking should be just a first step. Additional effort must be taken to enforce meaningful controls on the business use of residential property — and, frankly, we see noisy, overflowing bars and de facto rooming houses as the more significant concern. At the same time, the town might want to provide reasonable-cost parking and staging areas for contractors — a concept that has been floated in the past. If East Hampton’s small-business owners are going to be asked to shoulder a financial burden to make their neighborhoods more attractive, the community should be willing to provide something in return.

Of all the battles the East Hampton Town Trustees could be joining, the one in which a majority appears to be fighting for the right of bros to drink at Amagansett’s Indian Wells Beach is one on which they should have taken a pass.

If you are uncertain what bros means, the term comes from the millennial vernacular and describes young men who can put good times and camaraderie above common sense and courtesy. This is not to disparage the bros; in fact, we were them at one time too. The problem is that in summers past there have been too many at that particular beach and their alcohol-lubricated presence has made many longtime beachgoers feel unwelcome. The bros are fine; the beer not so much.

Over at Town Hall, there is a sense that a trial daytime alcohol ban put into place last August at Indian Wells should be revived for the coming summer. From what we hear, some trustees oppose the idea and may object. This feels misguided.

The trustees need to remember that this is not Daytona Beach at spring break. East Hampton is a second home to many of the voters who put the trustees in office, and their wish for a family-friendly, safe, and inviting beach must take precedence over what may be an anachronistic idea about liberty and the freedom to enjoy a beer wherever and whenever one wants. Maybe the trustees never actually saw Indian Wells in full swing, before the trial alcohol ban. We did on several occasions, and let us tell you, it was crazy and not all that nice to be around.

Frankly, it may be time for the town board to look at prohibiting alcohol on the Montauk beaches as well. Early morning there last summer often revealed unacceptable heaps of empty beer cans and other debris. And, as the trustees have said, clamp down at Indian Wells and the party will just move elsewhere.

Town officials, whether on Pantigo Road or in the trustees’ headquarters in the Lamb Building in Amagansett, must again ask in whose interest they should govern. Promoting daytime bacchanals on our glorious beaches is not of broad public benefit.

In an interesting development, the Village of East Hampton’s code enforcement officer and fire inspector has suggested taking a hard look at basements. The issue Ken Collum identified and asked the village board to consider regulating is that a growing number of property owners are including vast underground warrens in building or reconstructing houses. They can do so because the village code does not require basement square-footage to be calculated in the size of a house. The loophole is resulting in bedrooms and other amenities beyond what would be allowed if they were aboveground.

Why this matters may not be immediately obvious, but it is. Land is finite here, as is the ability to handle growth. Infrastructure needs increase with every additional person that is shoehorned onto the South Fork. This includes water use, electricity, waste flow, and the traffic generated by the service personnel needed to keep it all tidy and in working order. And the impacts can extend far beyond the village boundaries. Think for a moment of the slow-moving “trade parade” of vehicles, which is now year round. Though some in real estate and those looking to profit from “flipping” ever-larger houses may disagree, limits are in everyone’s best interest over the long term.

Knowing Mr. Collum as we have for quite a few years, we can say with confidence that if he says something is a problem, it really is a problem. During a village board meeting on Feb. 5, he described residential rebuilding projects being taken to legal limits in terms of floor area and basements that defy the traditional understanding of the word, including some that extend out under lawns and driveways.

The village board plans to appoint an informal group to study the big-basement trend and perhaps write new rules to confront it. Central to the undertaking will be an honest look at just how many people and how much traffic the village can reasonably accommodate. The battle for preserving East Hampton Village may now be moving underground.

The latest in a string of shockers out of Albany came this week when it became known that the Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo administration had begun automatically purging the computers of state workers of email messages more than 90 days old.

In a world that now runs on email, it is difficult to imagine anything more immediately destructive to the interests of government oversight and an open society. For the news media and the courts, as well as ordinary citizens, the right of access to official documents and communications is absolutely fundamental to the separation of democracy from the siren temptations of authoritarianism. Other than those eager to cover up malfeasance or embarrassment, as well as to scrub the record in the face of a prospective presidential bid at some point by their boss, few could see this as even a remotely good idea.

First described by The Albany Times-Union, mass deletions of email messages began last week at as many as 27 state agencies and departments. In a statement already chilling to open-government activists, the governor’s new chief information officer wrote that the goal was a new, centralized, easy-to-clear email record “making government work better.” Nonsense. This is an attempt to make Albany more secretive than it already is and to help officials evade scrutiny when things go awry.

Few public initiatives take less than three months to complete, so getting rid of records at that point could well make the state’s work less efficient, not more, as important documents slip away. Allowing wholesale clearing of in-boxes will only make state officials’ jobs more difficult. Imagine the chaos as regulators have to think months back, perhaps to find out who may have received something of interest when a difficult task was tackled, and then circle around to get a replacement copy.

The state put out a list of categories of email that should be saved manually, as reported by ProPublica, but they covered conclusive or final actions rather than the process or reasoning behind them. In addition, the rules ran to an impossible 188 pages, itemizing 225 different types of records. Most troubling for the news media, plaintiffs, and outside groups, messages concerning administrative analysis, planning, and the development of procedures can be tossed out as soon as they’re “obsolete.”

The impulse for secrecy and to dodge accountability appears endemic on the American political scene from top to bottom. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used a private account for much of her communication while in that post. Former East Hampton Town Councilwoman Theresa Quigley maintained a personal gmail address from which she circulated board agendas to a select group of supporters. In each case, they appeared able to skirt document-retention rules.

It is only by hindsight that the importance of some messages can even be known. Consider a recent example in the State of New Jersey, where, five months after an unexplained lane closure on the George Washington Bridge, the discovery of a brief email exchange pointed to its political nature. The details of this scandal could not have been lost on Albany’s executive chamber. Under the new Cuomo retention policy, had that email emanated from a New York office, it would likely have been deleted well before it and other damning communications could have come to light.

With regard to open government, New York State officials at all levels already find it almost impossible to comply with Freedom of Information requests. Allowing massive quantities of email to dissolve into the ether will make things worse. For example, The East Hampton Star has been seeking without success a key document from August sent to the State Department of State that apparently laid out a suspect legal rationale for the planned Army Corps of Engineers downtown Montauk erosion-control project. Could that have been among the records deemed not worthy of preservation?

The new state rules also contain a disturbing Catch-22. Although those that might be subject to a Freedom of Information request are to be preserved, such requests must be filed within the allotted 90 days. Seek something on day 91, and it will be gone, in most cases. Moreover, those seeking information from government often do not know exactly what documents they want, only the subject and approximate date. It would therefore make sense to save everything. Certainly, the Microsoft system the state uses has the capacity — up to 30 years’ worth of email, according to reports. Federal policy is to hold on to email for at least seven years, and permanently for executive staff.

If the wholesale destruction of email is allowed to continue, it will leave huge gaps in the record, diminish confidence in government, and hide wrongdoing. The policy must be reversed, ideally by the New York Legislature’s passing a bill that forces Mr. Cuomo’s hand.