Environment

Last week the number of water bodies in Montauk and Amagansett with harmful levels of enterococcus bacteria increased, according to Concerned Citizens of Montauk, and a harmful blue-green algae bloom was in Kellis Pond in Bridgehampton.

The Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council formally concluded on June 2 that plans for the South Fork Wind farm, including its 12 turbines and a $12 million fisheries compensation package, are consistent with the state's Ocean Special Area Management Plan.

An environmental remediation project designed in part to showcase sound and sustainable landscaping practices is taking shape in East Hampton Village. Called a bioswale, it is a veritable meadow of trees, plants, and grasses native to Long Island that is designed to absorb road runoff, filter pollution from stormwater, and provide native habitat while beautifying a public space. 

The East Hampton Town Board is expected to approve use of an aquatic weed harvester in Georgica Pond on Thursday. Used in the pond in the summers of 2016, 2017, and 2018, and on a limited basis last year, the harvester is part of a multifaceted effort to alleviate conditions that have promoted blooms of toxic cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) that have fouled the pond every summer for almost a decade.

A request from State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele and environmental advocates that East Hampton Town allocate 2 percent of funds it receives from the Peconic Bay Region's Community Preservation Fund to the Peconic Estuary Partnership was endorsed by the town board on Tuesday.

Summer water temperatures are rising in East Hampton, stressing organisms including bivalves and seagrasses. Meanwhile, the water quality in Wainscott Pond is rapidly worsening, with 2020 measurements of a toxin "unlike anything we'd ever seen," the town trustees were told on Monday.

"The effects of climate change are obvious and go beyond scallops," Christopher Gobler of Stony Brook University's School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences said in a lecture last week. "Locally, things are collapsing." Excessive nitrogen loading, too, poses a threat to both coastal ecosystems and human health.

The momentum building for meaningful action on climate change on the national level was reflected in East Hampton on Tuesday, when the town board heard, and responded enthusiastically to, a recommendation from its energy sustainability committee to declare a climate emergency, something 1,874 jurisdictions in 33 countries have already done.

With many parts of the Town of East Hampton at moderate, high, or extreme risk of flooding, the planned October start of the project's implementation was prominent in "Montauk's Coastal Resiliency and the Future of Our Beaches," a Dec. 16 webinar hosted by Concerned Citizens of Montauk.

The southern pine beetle, an invasive pest now considered by the D.E.C. to be an established species on the South Fork, has made a comeback in East Hampton Town and regions of the Central Pine Barrens, town and state officials said this week.

The Peconic Land Trust has acquired a 1.4-acre commercially developed property on Georgica Pond in Wainscott and plans to restore it to its natural state.

The “four horsemen of the ocean climate change apocalypse” have arrived, a scientist told those attending a symposium Friday on the bay scallop die-off of 2019, and they pose a serious threat to the embattled species. 

Native pines will rise once again on town lands where the trees had been devastated by the southern pine beetle, a pest that is having less and less of an impact in East Hampton each year since it first began wreaking havoc on the trees in the fall of 2017.

Baymen and lovers of shellfish can hold on to hope that East Hampton waters will offer an abundant crop of bay scallops when they open to the annual harvest on Sunday, but if the first days’ harvest in state waters is an indication, they will be disappointed.

Though the South Fork has been spared a hurricane in recent years, the signs of a warming world are difficult to miss in East Hampton.