The creation of a geographic entity — a village in this case — out of opposition to offshore wind power would seem the stuff of some far fringe of society. Only it isn’t. A small group of south-of-the-highway Wainscott property owners dismayed at the plan for an underground electric cable at Beach Lane are serious about their wish to form their own government and took a consultant’s plan to the Wainscott citizens committee in an online meeting on Saturday to pitch their idea.

Offshore wind power has a strange effect, in that it can make otherwise sane people seem bonkers. To wit: Several anti-cable folks organized a protest earlier this month at Beach Lane on the premise of saving the critically endangered right whale — only they put a photo of a breaching humpback whale on their road signs announcing the event, and, anyway, climate change-driven changes in their food supply are believed to be behind the recent and precipitous decline in right whale numbers. There is a particularly bitter irony in that in 1907 a group of Wainscott men killed one of the last few right whales taken for their oil, a juvenile, whose mother was killed the same day by an Amagansett whaling crew. The bones of the Amagansett whale hung in the American Museum of Natural History in New York for many years. The Wainscott juvenile was sent to the British Museum in London, supposedly in exchange for a mounted and stuffed dodo.

Read the complete editorial in the East Hampton Star.