Pollinator Apocalypse
Springs
July 27, 2026
Dear David,
About six years ago, I began creating a pollinator garden at my home. By the second summer, I had a huge array of different species of bees, butterflies, and the occasional hummingbird providing a welcome daylong hum in the garden. My vegetable garden flourished with an abundance of pollinator-dependent fruits like cucumbers, squash and peppers.
This year has been largely silent. My pollinator-friendly native plants are in full bloom, but all I have seen is a solitary bumblebee flitting, lonely, among the flowers. A deep sense of dread has been growing in the pit of my stomach. What has caused this pollinator apocalypse? I apply no pesticides whatsoever around my property. I “leave the leaves” from autumn until May, so the bugs that the birds and my garden depend on have a chance to overwinter and raise their babies.
I can think of only one cause: the massive application of pesticides to kill ticks by residents of East Hampton. These pesticides have no actual impact on tick-borne disease — you have to treat yourself, not your property, to be protected from that — but they do kill off the pollinators that are the basis of our food chain.(They also poison pets and kids.)
It’s time to control ticks on deer (the main vector for tick-borne illness) the same way we need to control them on ourselves — by applying insecticide to individuals, not the massive slaughter of every insect in the environment. We need “four-posters” for deer.
My heart is broken when I walk around my garden, where the silence is witness to the deadly habits of my neighbors. We need common-sense solutions, not the indiscriminate poisoning of our environment.
Sincerely,
FRANCESCA RHEANNON
Within Hours
East Hampton
July 24, 2026
Hello,
I wish to publicly acknowledge Stephen Lynch and the Town of East Hampton Highway Department. Within hours of notifying Mr. Lynch of a pothole concern, the three potholes on Middle Highway were filled.
BERNADETTE CANNY
A Pile of Grass
Amagansett
July 27, 2026
To the Editor,
Friday night, I parked the car across the street from Rowdy Hall. Gil and I made our way across 27, cars stopping for an elderly gentleman using a walker to get to the other side.
A couple waited for us as we reached the curb.
“Do you drive a gold Infinity?”
“Yes,” I said, wondering why they’d ask. They had watched me park and noticed something stuffed into the tailpipes of our vehicle.
“You’d better take care of it.”
Gil and I looked at each other incredulously.
“Don’t worry. We’re going across the street, and we’ll see what we can do.” They wished us a good evening and took off.
We returned to the car after our dinner. A huge pile of grass was lying on the cement under the tailpipes.
How had grass gotten stuffed in there? Who were these magnanimous strangers? What would have happened if they hadn’t noticed grass stuffed in the tailpipes and removed it? I don’t know, but I do know how generous and kind our Amagansett neighbors are and how grateful I am to them.
Sincerely,
BONNIE BACH
Everything in Common
Springs
July 25, 2026
To the Editor,
The porch of the Springs General Store is gone — as someone famous said, “You can’t go home again” — it’s only a memory.
A bike ride. Kristie’s “Good morning, Pete.” A steaming cup of coffee. One of Jen’s muffins. And the “crowd,” some with dogs, Bonackers and weekenders, painters and carpenters, retirees and the car guys, magnificent sports cars, we had nothing in common and everything in common; we moaned, we complained, and we breathed the invigorating air of Springs.
Fours years ago, shuttered. A new owner. Some of us met with Daniel, nice guy, ambitious plans, the opening of the new Springs General Store, a year away — or never.
A kerfuffle about whether the wine store in the shed would only carry natural wines? Or did I spell it wrong, whines?
The porch crowd might be a good title for a mini-series, each episode recounting a porch adventure. Any writers on there? Guess I can ask Siri.
I drive by every few days, a fence around the store. I stop and my mind wanders, I can almost taste Jen’s toasted corn muffin. I know; it’s gone, I have to move on. It’s hard (sigh), the clock only moves in one direction.
PETER GOODMAN
Wake-Up Call
Springs
July 27, 2026
Dear David,
The propane explosion on Fort Pond Boulevard should be a wake-up call for town officials. Regardless of what investigators ultimately determine caused the blast, it underscores a much larger problem: years of inadequate code enforcement and the unchecked proliferation of illegal apartments in single-family homes.
This has become increasingly common in Springs, where illegal conversions create serious public safety, environmental, and health risks. In addition, as more unpermitted housing is created, our school and taxpayers bear the cost. The Springs School District increasingly seeks tax increases while unchecked population growth from illegal housing exacerbates the school’s budget needs. Meanwhile, town officials do nothing while such properties evade oversight and the taxation intended to support the services they use.
Questions surrounding the town’s failure to address this particular property require answers. And this is not an isolated occurrence; any resident in Springs can tell you the addresses of several properties illegally converted into apartments. The town board must enforce the law and cannot continue ignoring this problem until the next tragedy.
JACQUELINE ESPOSITO
Entitled to Know
Wainscott
July 27, 2026
Dear David,
The recent proposal by the town board to install affordable housing, also known as subsidized housing, on the parcel located on Wainscott Harbor Road does not mention the tax burden on the local community. As one newspaper wrote, that the burden is spread among the community.
As with other projects of this nature, it may require the hiring of union-wage contractors.
Will property be clear-cut, like Abraham’s Path, creating a stripped landscape out of a naturally forested land? The public is entitled to know all the details.
Wainscott is not a stepchild. Look at the commercial area and thank God there wasn’t a car wash destroying the area. This is not a case of “vote for it to find out what’s in it!” Flora and fauna should be included as well.
I do not think the town should be in the building business.
ARTHUR FRENCH
How Many People
East Hampton
July 26, 2026
To the Editor,
In last week’s Star, I was accused of planning another affordable housing project here as if that were akin to clubbing baby seals in the Arctic. First, I love baby seals. Heck, I am a sucker for all of Mother Nature’s creatures. Except spiders. And wasps. Oh, and most important, ticks. Come to think of it, I’m not too crazy about anything that thinks I’m their next meal. But I digress.
Building housing, yeah, that’s something I can get behind. The numbers are simply too frightening to avoid — 597 — that’s how many people applied for the 50 units at Gardiner’s Green in 2025; 170, that’s how many people are waiting for a crack at the 16 units at Cantwell Court; 30, that’s how many of the over 3,000 teachers, police, health care workers, and municipal workers here can buy a home on the open market; five, that’s how many years until the next town project, on Route 114.
So, am I planning on putting my 15 years’ experience as a real estate broker and five years working with the town for affordable housing to work on another project? Absolutely!
Soon you will know more, and your input will help shape the project. Working with the town, we will produce an opportunity for dozens of local families to live and work in the town they love. It could be you, your neighbor, your son’s teacher, your doctor, or the town employee who plows your street.
Time to get to work!
KIRBY MARCANTONIO
Disgracefully Spun
Amagansett
July 24, 2026
To the Editor:
The demonstration against Mark Rowan at his restaurant Lulu in Sag Harbor was disgracefully spun on social media as an antisemitic action against a random Jewish restaurant in posts which do not even mention Mr. Rowan. For anyone who needs to be reminded, he is the billionaire owner of Lulu and of Duryea’s, who went miles out of his way in life, from his career as a hedge-fund guy, to intervene in East Hampton government, academic freedom at the University of Pennsylvania and elsewhere, and most recently, as a friend of Trump, in Gaza. The demonstration touched on all three of these invasions.
As a Jewish kid in Brooklyn, I sometimes played a game of imagining a dish that would violate the most Kosher laws possible. The winner would be a jambalaya with shrimp, pork, and cheese. Here are some entrees from the Lulu menu: the Lobster Tower, for $215, with “1lb Lobster, oysters (18), Snow crab claws (5), Topneck clams (8), shrimp (6), tuna tartare”; the Lulu’s cheeseburger, $33, with “short rib, chuck [and] cheddar,” and the Woodfire Grilled Presa Iberico Pork, $56, with “crispy confit pork belly, grilled peach, crispy chickpeas, blistered & pickled cherry tomato, riviera olives, grilled baby corn, [and] Lulu sauce blanche” (which, as we all know, contains butter and milk).
“A lie is halfway around the world while the truth is still putting its boots on.” I find this colorful and true, even though Mark Twain, H.G. Wells, Winston Churchill, Bertrand Russell, Bernard Shaw, and W.C. Fields all never said it.
There are two problematic types of people involved with an outrageous lie like this one. The morally worse ones are the liars who invent it. Once you get to know some of these people, you understand that those stepping up today to pose as defenders of Judaism are mostly Trump supporters, gleefully using the MAGA tactic of the egregious, pre-emptive, crippling lie, and defenders of Israel and its violence at any cost and not the least bit concerned with real antisemitism, but only with using the accusation as a sword to end anti-Zionist advocacy.
However, the second group is much larger, and arguably a bigger danger to democracy: they are at least nominally, or even very, decent people who get conned every day into believing the lie, and who sign up for mindless mob action, trying to end the jobs, educations, and careers of people who said, “free Palestine” or mentioned genocide in a social media post.
I implore those people: Please think about who you have become in that moment, how it is you have abandoned all the benefits of a liberal arts education, which should have led you both to evaluate the person lying to you, and the content of the lie itself, and what advice Maimonides, Mendelssohn, Spinoza, or Einstein might have for you right now or, for that matter, what William Penn or Benjamin Franklin would think (or, while we’re at it, Mark Twain, et al.).
For democracy in East Hampton,
JONATHAN WALLACE
Uprooting Existence
Amagansett
July 24, 2026
To the Editor,
Recently an orca was sighted in our waters, like the orca that saves Alex in “From the Depths of Time — A Whale Song,” a story, perhaps the only true environmental feature narrative of its kind, that could become a calling card for our time, a film for which I am looking for visionary support, a story I believe could remind us of why we are here on Earth alongside hundreds of thousands of species, many of which will be on their last legs because of climate disaster, all of which could have been averted if leaders had had the gumption to acknowledge that the biosphere is fragile and in trouble. But oil and gas took over under the auspices of certain people, and we bankrupted the future, probably forever.
When we first took our son to Africa, as he learned to walk and greet tribal members and learn to speak the names of the other animals, Marie and I filmed every moment of connection to the organic world like a miracle and the documentary that we made “Walking Thunder” (walkingthunderfilm.com), which “mesmerized” Jane Goodall, is on Amazon Prime. It was shown in L.A. in her honor last summer. We were even privileged enough to hear the true account of a Kikuyu woman giving birth in the wild while a bull elephant watched over her, building an acacia thorn fence around her to protect her from predators — perhaps the most unique story in the history of human wildlife interaction.
But now the droughts in Africa threaten the very life forms, human and nonhuman, that inspired our journey over the last quarter century. The oceans are acidifying, and most of the Great Barrier Reef is bleaching and becoming unrecognizable, causing some researchers to cry at the loss. Antarctica’s melt will cause coastal cities to drown this century.
The story “From the Depths of Time” reminds us why the other beings of the world are indispensable. It is meant as a prayer to the life force of the planet. The heroine, just 18, is a Joan of Arc for the animal world. Years ago, when our son was 3, we took him to greet and be welcomed by the gray whales of Baja. The native people tell of Coyaima, the all-white gray whale considered sacred who had no tail but who twisted its body like a screwdriver to propel itself through the water. Its name meant the “light that comes out of the darkness.” Native people everywhere have a living, breathing cosmology that honors the other species.
Our dysfunctional capitalist system based on growth is uprooting existence. The grays are now undergoing a catastrophic population die-off because they cannot get enough copepods and crustaceans in the Arctic. The polar bears are having to choose between starving and drowning to find sea ice.
There is perhaps no other close large-mammal encounter like the grays on Earth. One local fisherman, the son of Franciso Mayoral, who first touched a gray over a generation ago, told me that despite the slaughter we have inflicted on them over the last century and a half, they come to us, because they have “forgiven” us! It is the most powerful statement I have ever heard.
So now we wait and hope the humpbacks will return to our shores. The “leaders” all embedded with big business and oil and gas are causing the world to go extinct. It is an event that Gen Z will never be able to forgive us for.
One elder in East Africa whose tribe, the Samburu, used to adopt baby elephants when they had lost their mothers in the wild, said, “Without the other animals, there will be nothing to return to. We will lose our minds.” Occasionally, we are given the vision, a sign that the ocean still speaks to us, like the killer whale that just manifested off our shores. For tribes of the Northwest, the orca’s breath connects the ocean to the Earth, the ancestors to the living. For the whales and all other species, the Endangered Species Act cannot be lost or we will lose the Earth. The extraordinary Paul Watson of Sea Shepherd was kind enough to write the intro to our last book on our son’s childhood, “Wonder and the World.” He is battling the merchant krill vessels in the southern oceans depriving whales of their main food source.
If you have any thoughts about how to help manifest “From the Depths of Time — A Whale Song” please connect with me at [email protected], for as one elder told me in the Southwest, “We are living on borrowed time.”
CYRIL CHRISTO
Sent Into War
East Hampton
July 24, 2026
To the Editor,
Nick LaLota wants us to know that public service is “a privilege, not an investment strategy,” and that he has refused to trade individual stocks since taking office. He is also cosponsoring H.R. 7008, the Stop Insider Trading Act, which bars members of Congress and their families from purchasing new individual stock while allowing them to keep existing holdings and exempting the president entirely.
It is an interesting definition of reform: Prohibit conduct the sponsor says he already avoids while leaving untouched the one office that has attracted the greatest public scrutiny over conflicts of interest.
Yet the timing of this letter is even more striking. At the very moment the United States is engaged in military conflict with Iran without a congressional vote authorizing it, this administration has suggested that those who question its actions are somehow unpatriotic.
Mr. LaLota wants my opinion about stock trades. I’d rather know where he stands on whether Congress still has a constitutional role in deciding when Americans are sent into war, and whether asking that question is now considered disloyal.
That’s the survey I’d like to receive.
Sincerely,
ANDREW VAN PRAAG
Town Halls
East Hampton
July 23, 2026
Dear Mr. Rattray,
Nick LaLota has not held an in-person town hall meeting since taking office. Rather, he has held telephone town halls, claiming that thousands of constituents can participate simultaneously.
In his March 2025 telephone town hall, which lasted one hour, Mr. LaLota responded to eight questions, according to the transcript. One year later, Mr. LaLota held another telephone town hall. No transcript is available for this telephone town hall, but if he answered the same number of questions, Mr. LaLota has responded by telephone to fewer than 20 questions posed by his constituents in one year!
As part of his action plan if elected to Congress, Chris Gallant states that he will, “host monthly town halls across Congressional District 1, rotating throughout Suffolk County so residents from every community have the chance to ask questions, raise concerns, and hear directly from their representative.”
Any person elected to a public office has the responsibility to engage with his or her constituents, not once a year by telephone, but rather in person on a regular basis. Mr. LaLota never has. Mr. Gallant will.
In fact, Mr. Gallant is holding a town hall meeting in Riverhead on Aug. 9 from 1 to 3 p.m., when he will answer questions and address concerns. You can sign up to attend on the Gallant for Congress website. I hope to see you there.
SALVATORE TOCCI