You need no further evidence as to the extent of global warming than the hot air given off in the Republican candidates’ “debates.”

That alone ought to raise the earth’s temperature by perhaps as much as 2 degrees.

These man-made emissions will mean the sea level will rise even more and sooner than expected, threatening the G.O.P. base’s castles in the sand. And, of course, the world’s riparian poor, whose accommodations are less substantial, will be swept away as the waters trickle up.

Trickle-down economic theory plus the trickle-up consequences of environmental missteps, then, ought to restore balance to the food chain and relieve the pressure that overpopulation has put on our precious resources.

“. . . You take exception to this exceptionalism, you say? I’m sorry, the borders are closed, no demurrals may pass through my cranial checkpoint. Seek asylum for your ‘buts’ elsewhere. . . .”

Well, enough imaginings provoked by closed minds — one of the worst threats to life on earth that there is at the moment.

If peace of mind cannot be achieved collectively speaking, then our species is at great risk. Five major extinctions have been said to have occurred in eons past. Wouldn’t it be interesting if the sixth, rather than caused by meteor strikes or volcanic activity, were owing to closed minds.

Only together can we reverse the trend, by championing diversity and creativity and an egalitarian spirit rather than the evil of nihilism and its attendant propaganda, which often is cloaked as the word of God.

Bernie Sanders is right when he says it all began with our invasion of Iraq. It opened Pandora’s box.

“Hope was the only good the casket had held among the many evils,” Edith Hamilton wrote of it in her “Mythology.”

“And it remains to this day mankind’s sole comfort in misfortune.”

Yet we cannot rely on justice descending from on high. In the end, it’s just us, it’s just up to us.

I liked what the woman in one of our papers the other day said she was thankful for: the moon (I would say especially the moon the way it has been the past few nights), the stars, the sun, of course, and air, water, fire, and a roof over your head.

Keep it simple is what I gather she’s saying. Love your neighbor as yourself and cultivate your garden. Speaking of which, Mary asked me what we should do with ours now that the calendar says winter’s approaching. “Put a blanket on it and when you take it off there will be growth in the spring, Ben,” I said. (We had seen “Being There” on TV the night before.)

She, who is keenly sensitive to the news, and who suffers because of it, has begun a file for me of stories attesting to the resilience of the human spirit.

One was of a bookseller in Islamabad who has, I think, the largest bookstore in the world, or one of the largest. Chomsky sells there, so do books on atheism and the Qur’an. In other words, he has, in a part of the world that we’ve come to think of as extremely close-minded, a catholic audience. 

Another best seller there is “Fallen Leaves,” by Will Durant, whose histories I’ve faithfully read, making me potentially knowledgeable up to the Napoleonic period, when the Durants left off.

Ahmad Saeed, the owner, told of elderly men coming in, offering to pay for books they’d stolen when they were children. “His late father, Saeed Jan Qureshi, would have been amused: He had always regarded book theft by children as an investment in a future where people still read, and thus become his customers.”  

“Fallen Leaves” struck a chord with me, of course, because I’ve been raking them, though there are fewer than there used to be because we’ve been culling the trees. My sister-in-law, who’d come for Thanksgiving, saw me raking and wondered why I didn’t get a blower. No, simpler (and quieter) is best, though I must admit I sigh when I see the village leaf-suckers plying their way along the streets of Sag Harbor (and when I look across the street at the house that now sits on what had been our leaf repository for years and years). A fellow carts them away now after I rake them, for a reasonable fee.

Another of the stories Mary clipped had to do with the owner of the Hummus Bar, Kobi Tzafrir, in Kfar Vitkin, a small village near the Mediterranean Sea, who wants Arabs and Israelis to reconnect over his hummus plates, which he’s offering at a 50-percent discount if they will sit together. “Give Chickpeas  a Chance” was the headline in The Daily Mail’s story.

There were also a number of stories here this week that had to do with cultivating the garden of hope and with loving your neighbor — not only in Sag Harbor, where people raised money for the family of a young athlete, Nick Kruel, who’d undergone open heart surgery, but in Lesbos, where Doug Kuntz and a group inspired by his photographs (which deserve to be in a national publication such as National Geographic) are now helping Syrian refugees, and in Malawi, as well, where a local teacher, Kryn Olson, wants to build five school libraries to hold books donated and collected here.

Mary’s file is growing.

I was driving though Bridgehampton the other day and passed the place on Montauk Highway where a vehicle struck Anna Pump as she tried to cross the road. Ms. Pump, who died of her injuries at Southampton Hospital later that day, had been in a crosswalk.

Crosswalks can be dangerous, particularly at night and at this time of the year when night comes before the close of the business day. This is why the Town of Southampton is creating an illuminated, flashing crossing near the Hampton Library like those already in place in East Hampton Village. But even those are not without risks. 

At about dusk on Sunday, as I was driving westward in the left of two lanes on Main Street in my pickup truck, I slowed for two people approaching in the crosswalk from the other side of the street. I could not tell if they were together or not, as one was a step or two behind the other. What was obvious though was that it was, for them, a risky moment; they had not pushed the button to trigger the crosswalk’s blinking lights, and they were both wearing dark clothes.

I looked to my right side-view mirror; a sport utility vehicle was coming up fast, apparently oblivious to the fact that there was a crosswalk ahead. Not knowing what else to do, I lightly beeped the horn several times in rapid succession and then shifted my truck back and forth into the right lane.

The pedestrians made it across the street okay. I was unable to tell if the S.U.V. driver had understood what was going on or thought I was just another nut on the road. Bridgehampton’s new lighted crosswalk will turn on when someone steps into the road rather than relying on a button. This might help, but the trend is not good for people on foot. 

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the rate of pedestrian deaths as a total of all fatalities in the United States has been increasing over the last decade at a time when the annual rate of road deaths over all has been falling sharply. 

The agency also issues pointers about crossing streets. They include this basic advice: Never assume that a driver has seen you.

From time to time my West Coast niece and nephew post family photographs on Facebook, where I am surprised by a young version of myself. I am pleased the photos were saved and are retrievable, but am reminded that I still haven’t figured out how to print photographs that arrive these days via the Internet. 

Before it became easy for anyone with a cellphone or iPhone to take photos and save them electronically, I had family photos, particularly of the grandchildren, printed, framing some and putting others in albums. Now, however, they are somewhere in the ether, which isn’t the same thing.

Recently, however, I learned that my family had a different saving habit when a box arrived from a cousin in Dallas that threw me for a loop. It contained more than 400 penny and 2-cent picture postcards (with post card as two words) to and from relatives and friends, some of whom I may not ever have known. They had been mailed in the 1940s and ’50s. 

It was easy to know there were more than 400 in the box because Cousin Harriet, or someone in her household, had divided them, bundled them with rubber bands, and written down how many were in each stack on little pieces of pink paper. 

According to Harriet, who filled me in by email, of course, my parents had saved the postcards and given them to her when she was about 10. She’s just a few years younger than I am, so you can guess how long ago that was. What I don’t understand is how or why my parents — actually, it must have beenmy mother — convinced others to send their postcards along.

Taking a random look at them, I found one with a picture of a bathing beauty that I had mailed from Atlantic City to my brother, who apparently had stayed home. “Believe it or not, I miss you. . . . Milty is cute. He belongs to a frat so we hope to make time.” I certainly don’t remember any of that.

There are postcards addressed to a family named Koyt in Newark, others from one of my mother’s nieces to her parents, one addressed to my parents on my grandparents’ farm, and one that a friend named Shayna sent to me in care of another friend, whose name was Ruth, apparently having forgotten my address. Shea said she was having a wonderful time in Chicago, and wrote: “Play Dead!” I’ve no idea what we thought that meant.

One postcard in the box made sense because it was likely to have been added to the mix. It was addressed to Harriet’s parents, who lived in the Bronx. The picture is of a hotel called the Aristocrat in Miami Beach. 

“Dear Elfrieda and Sammy,” Sam’s sister Dotty and her husband, Frank, wrote: “We arrived safe and sound, but dead tired. Train was late starting and later getting here. The weather is fair but windy. Did you have a nice time at the affair? Will write more tomorrow. Love to you and the children.”

Someone could make a profession of studying these postcards, but it’s not me. I’m afraid that what I have to do is find someone who is 10 years old and give them away.

“All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter.” 

So wrote Hemingway in “A Moveable Feast,” the writer’s recollections of life in 1920s Paris among fellow expatriates and the “Lost Generation” that survived the First World War. 

Upended, lately, by assorted turmoil including the insomnia that has afflicted me on and off since college, I awoke, disoriented, in the evening, a few Fridays ago, to the news from Paris. 

Had it really come to this? Young adults slaughtered at, of all places, a rock ’n’ roll concert, that boisterous, communal expression of youthful exuberance, of freedom? It had. 

I thought of lazy, early summer days in that city, 13 lucky years ago and midway on a long journey home from India. Fresh from the choking filth and chaos of Delhi, I wandered near-empty streets in the predawn silence, was languorous in the sunny afternoon at the Jardin du Luxembourg, and in the evening savored pints of beer on the cobblestone streets at Montmartre. 

Seven years on and just after another Indian excursion random impressions endure of a few days in Lyon and then Paris, five or six of us on a boozy, blissful junket. On the last night, a few of us seeking out and staying late at a subterranean jazz club. In the morning, a lone exploration through narrow, winding streets to a photographic exhibit of the Rolling Stones’ 1971 exile to Cap Ferrat in Nice. In the taxi line outside the Gare de Lyon, an elderly woman stood, patient and radiant in a classically chic blue dress. And everywhere flowers and shady terraces and conversation and wine. 

I thought of a night and a day in Mumbai, two years after another nihilistic band of nobodies, on the eve of another Thanksgiving in America, had gunned down random human beings in the hours before their own violent demise. To the slayer comes a slayer. 

How hideously apt, and aptly hideous, that the philistines assaulted laissez-faire concertgoers — and many others — in the city of both light and art. Fitting, too, that the clash of present and primitive took place where the United Nations Conference on Climate Change would, barely two weeks later, set a course for the future. 

On Monday, according to The Times, President Obama said that the conference represented “an important turning point in world history,” and that he believed, “in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., that there is such a thing as being too late.” 

While at least 170 countries have announced a plan for future fossil-fuel emissions, The Times reported, India’s leader, Narendra Modi, said that his country plans to double its use of coal by 2019 and triple its 2005 carbon emissions by 2030. (On Monday, the U.S. embassy in New Delhi recorded air pollution levels “well into ‘hazardous’ territory,” Reuters reported.) 

Syria’s civil war, which has drawn and further radicalized French and other European nationals, may have been sparked, in part, by climate change, according to a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The “worst drought in the instrumental record,” the report stated, caused “widespread crop failure and a mass migration of farming families to urban centers.” The water shortage, said National Geographic, drove up food prices, sickened children, and forced 1.5 million into Syria’s crowded cities, “just as that country was exploding with immigrants from the Iraq war.” 

A movable feast or a future of famine? Free expression or mass extinction? 

“You expected to be sad in the fall,” Hemingway wrote. “Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen.” 

But, he added, “When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.” 

“This isn’t political,” Josh Homme, a co-founder of Eagles of Death Metal, the ironically named band that was performing when the slayers came to Paris, told Vice magazine. “We’re going to recruit people to be part of life, to be citizens of the earth,” Mr. Homme, who was not with the band that night, said of their future plans. “We have a chance to come together.” 

Christopher Walsh is a reporter for The Star.

Leo the pig will not be 4 until the spring, but he already weighs about 10 times as much as his Texas trailer park breeder-slash-con artist claimed he would.

Regular readers of this column might remember Leo. He joined our household a couple of summers ago over my protests and after we sent a too-big check. My wife, Lisa, and eldest child had found out about supposed teacup pigs on (where else?) the Internet. He would only be about 10 pounds, they said. “And he won’t have tusks!”

Right.

I said he would end up about the size of our Labrador mix only with shorter legs. Lisa said he would stay small. We were both wrong.

The last time I was able to pick up Leo and step onto the bathroom scale with him, he weighed about 80 pounds. That was six months ago. Though he does not get fat-producing quantities of his special pig food, the lawn and fallen acorns are an endless source of calories, and his belly now clears our tile kitchen floor by only about two inches. Weasel, the Lab, tops out at just over 60 pounds.

Leo’s tusks are not really that big a deal, though we worry that one of these days he is going to get annoyed at Luna, the pug puppy, or Lulu, the little, long-haired mutt, and give one of them a slice. Instead, the problem is Leo’s hang- up about chairs, pots and pans, and anything else in the range of his snout. Place any object within about 16 inches of the ground, and Leo is going to flip it over or try to push it around. He has left a trail of broken chairs in his considerable wake and the lower shelves in the parts of the house he has access to are oddly bare.

In the aggregate though, Leo is less of a pain in the neck than the dogs. We have an understanding, he and I. Once he is fed in the morning and has received his requisite ear and chin scratching session from me and maybe an apple core or two, Leo heads back to bed. Later, he will go outside to graze and take care of his pig business on more or less private portions of the lawn. Meanwhile, the dogs follow me around, scrabble noisily among themselves over toys, leave their droppings wherever they please, and shed all over the place.

Indifferent, Leo shambles back inside and gets back into bed by the fireplace. By the time I leave the house to head to the office, he’s asleep again.

It’s a heck of a good life. Maybe I’m just jealous.

What am I feeling thankful for this week?  

I am thankful that, like most Americans, I live a life insulated from the various calamities and wars going on elsewhere in the world.

I am thankful that I, like most of us in East Hampton, am safe and secure enough to be able to pursue personal well-being and the well-being of those I am close to.

I am not thankful for the fact that this country is often defined by the accumulation of material goods‚ though there appears to have been a silver lining of sorts on Black Friday 2015: Despite the popular circulation in social media of grotesque videos of shopping as blood sport, this year there were reportedly fewer riots than in other recent years. I guess that’s something?

Although I think assigning nicknames to certain days is silly, I am thankful that Cyber Monday was followed by Giving Tuesday. In case you haven’t heard, Giving Tuesday is when charitable organizations drum up donations; in my case, I got appeals from a slew, including cultural institutions close to home and groups fighting hunger abroad. 

I was especially thankful this week for those from the East End who turned away from their own Thanksgiving-feast opportunities to step out and help others. A Star associate editor, Joanne Pilgrim, was among those who traveled to Greece last week to offer what help she could to the refugees landing on the island of Lesbos in search of peace and a bit of the security we tend to take for granted.

Doug Kuntz, a contributing Star photographer, has gone back and forth to Lesbos in the last two months not only to chronicle the hardships of those attempting to find safe havens but to help direct funds to where they are most needed. East End Cares, an organization based in Montauk — founded to help Long Islanders after Superstorm Sandy — not only sent clothing and needed goods but also was able to send medical supplies and equipment to Lesbos at the same time it organized volunteers to fly over. I am grateful to them all. 

This week is also an appropriate time to commend those protesters around this country who are raising the veil behind which we as a people have hidden the truths about racial inequity and injustice in the criminal justice system. 

On the other end of the gratefulness spectrum, however, I am definitely not singing any hosannas for the slate of hopefuls seeking the Republican nomination to run for president. These are not great days for the Grand Old Party. I would call the spectacle tragicomic, but, really, for those of us who take pride in American democracy, it is just plain sad.

Donald Trump represents the worst in human nature: greed, self-interest, xenophobia, cruelty, belligerence, pride, vanity, and an absolute lack of mercy or respect for those weaker, meeker, or poorer than himself. He scares me. During Thanksgiving week, he took pains to denigrate not just the undocumented immigrants living among us, but refugees, as well. When debating political questions, many of us bandy about the term “fascist” much too casually, but I believe that a Donald Trump presidency would be fascist by all real definitions.

The choices Fox News and CNN made about who would be on the main stages for the Republican debates — and consequently who took the mantle of principal contenders — has been a bit disturbing, too, because those choices were based on polling. An analysis of polling and public opinion surveys by Jill Lepore in the Nov. 16 New Yorker magazine, “Politics and the New Machine,” casts doubt not only on polls’ and surveys’ validity but on the assumption that they are, in the end, democratic. 

Good journalism, like hers, is also something to be thankful for.

Back when my reprobate buddies and I were in high school and had our first cars we would nervously drive past a place we called the Mafia House down near Two Mile Hollow Beach. Because there was a heavy metal gate across the twisting driveway we concluded that the residents had something to hide. It was the 1970s, and tales of the Cosa Nostra were in the air, you know. 

As strange as it may seem now, time was when there was just one gate across a driveway in the Village of East Hampton, and probably in the whole town, too. Now they are ubiquitous and at least one property owner, Ronald Perelman, doubles down by posting guards in idling sport utility vehicles near his driveway. Mr. Perelman’s gate not that long ago drew the attention of officials, who said it was too tall.

Some might blame deer as the reason why gates have become an all but essential aspect of the South Fork roadscape. I’m not so sure; perhaps deer are to blame in some cases, perhaps not. 

It’s not as if gates present all that much of a security deterrent or that there are hordes of curious interlopers creeping in for a look at the average, run-of-the-mill Hamptons homeowner’s house. No, it’s more than that.

Personally, I don’t like them, but then I don’t like a lot of what passes for contemporary taste. For example, don’t get me started on Belgian block driveway aprons, eyebrow windows, or outdoor lighting pointed up into the trees.

Had we had a gate at our house, my own one real brush with crime would not have been prevented. This was an incident in which I surprised a young man from out of town whom I caught rifling through my truck one dark night. Fast and wiry, he could have easily scaled anything we had put up to bar the driveway.

I know that there is no way East Hampton is going back to the days when gates were the exception rather then the rule, when picket fences with trailing pink roses were prevalent. Still, we could do with a little less of what they represent.

This past September I went to see Madonna in concert at Madison Square Garden with my concert buddies, Yuka, Maxine, and Tom. 

Yuka and I drove to the city. When we arrived we were both tired, since we had worked all day, especially Yuka, who is a talented costume designer and was on call for a film set at 6 that morning. We joined Maxine and her husband, Tom, who were already at the concert — Tom, who once told us Madonna was his baby sitter. She would bring her boyfriend over while baby-sitting, he said, and told him not to tell his parents because she really loves to baby-sit. Sounds like Madonna. 

Before the concert started, we all appeared calm; I was falling asleep, since it was way past my bedtime. At 10 she came out dancing and singing with her entourage, and we had a surge of adrenaline. Later I was emotional as I sang along with her classic hits like “Vogue,” “True Blue,” and “Burning Up,” to name just a few. At some point during the concert Madonna said she was feeling nostalgic and that she had played at Madison Square Garden 30 years ago. She was lost in sentiment, and so was I. Her music was what I enjoyed listening to in my younger years. She was my idol and still is! Not only was I in the same place as she was, but we were also both in the same nostalgic mood. I was in total bliss.

Part of the lyrics to her new song “Rebel Heart” touched me the most. The part when she sang, “Hearing my father say: ‘Told you so, told you so. Why can’t you be like the other girls?’ I said: ‘Oh no, that’s not me and I don’t think that it’ll ever be.’ ”

It reminded me of my oldest daughter, Kelsey, who just became a teenager and started to show some signs of rebellion. Over the summer, she wanted to dye her hair blue. I said, “No, it would ruin your beautiful long hair. Why can’t you be like your best friend, Emma? She didn’t dye her hair and see how healthy her hair looks.” 

“But, Mommy, please, it’s my hair.”

“Yes, it’s your hair,” I replied, but I get to look at it and wish you didn’t have blue hair.” Eventually, after numerous pleas, I gave in. I said, “If you only dye the ends of your hair.”  

“Okay, Mommy,” she said in her sweetest tone. She dyed her hair at my parents’ house with my sister’s help.

The blue hair was not blue, but a seaweed green color, which was perfect because that weekend at a beach party we were going to she could blend in with the seaweed while swimming in the ocean. But she ended up dying half of it, rather than just the ends. 

I was mad and I couldn’t help but try to find comfort from my colleague the next day. Kathy said, “Don’t worry; this is nothing. Let her make her own decisions and her own mistakes.” 

I thought about it and I guess she’s right. But I’ll still be there to help and guide her with good decisions, whether she likes it or not.

Last week, she wanted to trim off all the dye, because that part of her hair looked all dry and unhealthy. Excerpts from that song came to my mind, “Told you so, told you so.”

Now she has the cutest hairstyle for the holidays. She didn’t look bad with the blue-green hair. But I like her new hairstyle better! 

Just wondering what my young rebel heart will do next. 

Yupay Vong works in The Star’s production department.

As soon as I read the Times’s review, which said “The Humans” might turn out to be the best Broadway play of the season, I reserved two seats for a Wednesday matinee performance a month in advance of a Rogers Memorial Library bus trip we’d signed on to. 

It was only then that Mary told me she had wanted to see the hip-hop version of Alexander Hamilton. 

“Well, if ‘The Humans’ is depressing, we’ll go have a drink afterward, and if it’s not, we’ll have a drink anyway . . . to celebrate,” I said, mindful that not infrequently my enthusiasms can lead me astray when it comes to the arts.

“So, what’s it about?”

“A family’s Thanksgiving dinner,” I said, looking up from a thumbnail New Yorker review. “It says that the acting’s first-rate — the grandmother has Alzheimer’s . . . but that the play doesn’t lead anywhere. I don’t find that a problem, do you? I mean, about life not leading anywhere. . . ?”

“It sounds depressing. . . . Remember that movie you took me to on that other bus trip to the city, ‘Memphis.’ . . .”

“Say no more,” I said. “At least the theater seats were comfortable and we got some sleep.”

“This wasn’t the same reviewer? The one who raved about ‘The Humans’ wasn’t the same one who raved about ‘Memphis’ was he? Remember when you called the box office the night before and asked if there’d be any trouble getting seats the next day and the guy said he didn’t think so. Didn’t you say it sounded like he might have been suppressing an urge to laugh?”

“Well, I couldn’t tell for sure. . . .” 

“That should have been the tip-off.”

“But I was so fixated by then, fixated on treating you to a real work of art, one that held a mirror up to life. . . . Boring movies, depressing plays . . . I’m doing my best, I’m doing my level best!”