Environment

“There’s been some pretty significant glimmers of hope — only to have our hopes dashed again,” Peconic Baykeeper’s executive director, Pete Topping, said at the start of a panel discussion the group hosted in December on this year's scallop season and prospects for the future.

The spotted lanternfly, after making its first appearance on the South Fork last fall, continued its eastward march in 2024, with the fancy-looking insects showing up in every trap placed here by the Town of East Hampton.

Rain on Thursday notwithstanding, an unusually dry fall season persists statewide, raising concerns about fire and impact on crops. Last month, the county had only .23 inches of rainfall, just off the record low for October precipitation, and even with rain on Thursday, more than 99 percent of the county was considered to be in "severe drought."

Over the past five-plus years, Peconic Bay scallops have suffered mass die-offs blamed on an infectious parasite, but researchers at the Cornell Cooperate Extension have found a source of scientifically informed hope: genetic diversity.

“What is a new land ethic?” Stephan Van Dam, the president of ChangeHampton, asked rhetorically. The idea, he said, is “to disrupt our relationship with the natural world and overcome and change our attitude towards nature — the idea that we need to dominate nature. We need to disrupt that.” 

Work began late last month on a New York State Department of Transportation drainage project on Route 27 at Fort Pond that could ease flooding but add contaminants to the struggling water body. In fact, Concerned Citizens of Montauk says that if the project continues, and the group expects it will, the D.O.T. will be breaking state and federal law by sending unfiltered stormwater directly into the pond. 

Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. will moderate a ChangeHampton discussion Sunday on “between property owners and landscape designers, contractors and entrepreneurs” who are using “restorative landscaping, rewilding, and pursuing nature-based solutions to counteract the climate and biodiversity crises.” 

The size of a dune that East Hampton Town is considering building at Ditch Plain may ultimately be dictated by a Federal Emergency Management Agency calculation that would make it nearly 20 feet high.

ChangeHampton, a community organization that promotes biodiverse and sustainable landscaping practices, was in front of the East Hampton Town Board last week presenting updated plans for a grassland pollinator meadow at Town Hall and Justice Court.

If 2023 was the year of the shark on the South Fork, with multiple sightings leading to frequent temporary beach closings, 2024 seems to be the year of the whale. Last week, for the first time ever, “we had to pull people out of the water to let a whale pass. It was only 20 feet offshore,” said Drew Smith, the head lifeguard for East Hampton Village.

Playing out in the background of the rather apocalyptic and very visible destruction of the East End’s native pitch pines has been an equally devastating disease killing beech trees. With that in mind, East Hampton Town is working on ways to help residents remove dangerous trees, without running afoul of clearing restrictions.

The end-times landscaping job wrought by the southern pine beetle along Montauk Highway in Amagansett could seem pretty compared to how it would look after a fire. “It’s a giant tinderbox out there,” said Chris Beckert, who is in his fourth year as chief of the Amagansett Fire Department.

It’s mating season for the horseshoe crab, and last week, a group monitoring the crab for the Cornell Cooperative Extension dropped in on an all-night orgy repeated along bay beaches for 400 million to 500 million years.

With a sense of urgency, the East Hampton Town Board discussed the hiring of a surveyor to assess current beach profile conditions at Ditch Plain in Montauk and to determine the necessary volume and source of sand, its placement, and the cost to restore it to a healthy level.  

“Now is the hard moment,” East Hampton Town’s planning director told the town board during an assessment of a ravaged coastline after three storms in the past month, as mobilization for the downtown Montauk portion of the long-awaited Fire Island to Montauk Point beach renourishment project was getting underway.

Mobilization for the Montauk portion of the 83-mile-long Fire Island to Montauk Point beach renourishment project is to begin Thursday, with temporary road closures to allow mobilization of very large equipment including bulldozers and 35-foot lengths of piping. Beach infill is to begin next month, when an offshore dredge will pump 80,000 cubic yards of sand a day onto the downtown beach.

Near-hurricane-level winds, tides, and rain blasted the East End on Monday, leaving downtown Montauk with far more damage than any other place in Suffolk County.

The spotted lanternfly, a "planthopper" pest now common in New York City, has made its way to the East End, where it is a threat to wineries and native trees like the black walnut, silver maple, willow, and oak.

Our coastal zones have hit an all-time low in water quality, with impairments that violate New York State and federal guidelines ubiquitous, according to a report released last week. East Hampton Town waterways, while benefiting from ocean tidal flushing, are not immune from such impairments.

Abandoned cars, flooded basements, muddy pools, sodden festivals, panicked antiques dealers — those were the scenes on Sunday as the flooding that has overwhelmed parts of New York State’s Hudson Valley, Vermont, and many other parts of the world was visited on a South Fork packed with summer visitors. The East Hampton Town Highway Department estimated that nearly seven inches of rain fell over a sustained period of perhaps unprecedented intensity, while the Suffolk County Water Authority cited a rain gauge in Sag Harbor that put the rain total at 2.67 inches.

East Hampton Town’s forests are under assault from multiple species, the town board was told on Tuesday, and while invasive insects are a major component of the ongoing threat to them, “more aggressive deer management” was the recommendation to alleviate forest degradation.

Harvested for bait and their blood, horseshoe crabs, which have endured on earth for over nearly 500 million years, are in a state of decline in the New York area.

The bright blue slashes of paint stand out like neon under a black light, marking the trunks in a stand of healthy pine trees along both sides of Cranberry Hole Road on Napeague that will be sacrificed to protect the overall health of the region’s forests as the southern pine beetle continues its destructive eastward march.

The abnormally low water table coupled with the spread of invasive species are combining to threaten the long-term health of the East End’s coastal plain ponds.

Bird populations have declined steeply over the last 50 years, but the North American Bird Conservation Initiative's "State of the Birds 2022" report, published in early October, balanced the gloom with some success stories and offered strategies for future action which would "bring birds back."

Some 3,200 pitch pines on Napeague were being felled this week, victims of the southern pine beetle infestation that has killed thousands of trees in East Hampton Town since 2017.

A microscopic wormlike creature is rapidly killing American and European beech trees on the East End, and there is not much to be done about it. Beech leaf disease appears to have started in the United States in Ohio sometime before 2012. By 2019, it was on Long Island.

If the forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center are right, the 2022 Atlantic hurricane season will be the seventh consecutive year of above-average hurricane activity, with 14 to 21 named storms, three to six of which could become major hurricanes.

The currently projected range of sea level rise “will transform East Hampton into a series of islands with permanent submergence of low-lying areas as early as 2070.” That is the ominous conclusion that leads a draft of the town’s Coastal Assessment and Resiliency Plan, issued last week.

The southern pine beetle infestation that has killed thousands of pitch pines in East Hampton Town since 2017 is continuing its destructive march, with thousands more dead and dying trees identified this year.