Punishingly high energy prices are taking their toll all over the landscape. The costs of heating oil and gas are forcing families to make drastic cuts in other areas of the household budget, including food.

Municipal energy budgets are metastasizing like tumors. Energy surcharges have been added to the prices of items shipped across the country, pushing businesses to either pass on those costs or shave their profit margins, sometimes to the point of no profit, even loss.

And some local residents have simply no idea how they're going to pay to heat their homes next winter -- they're still trying to figure out how to pay off last winter's bill.

But not all of the news is grim in this most recent energy crisis.

As is often the case, hard times can create opportunity and spur innovation. So Maine's wood pellet stove vendors are doing a land-office business and some can't even keep the stoves in stock. That, in turn, is prompting a run on pellets and the new mills turning out those pellets can barely keep up with the demand.

While such demand can drive up prices, it's also evidence that a renewable, Maine-grown and Maine-processed alternative energy product -- wood pellets made from Maine trees -- has a viable and increasing market.

Likewise, there's progress on alternative energy on the municipal front, where land-use ordinances are being adopted to regulate residential wind turbines.

When many of the state's municipal land-use ordinances were written and adopted, there wasn't demand for small windmills of the sort that are now becoming commercially available. There's still not much demand for the units, which can cost upwards of $6,000. But just in case, Manchester residents recently adopted a new ordinance that sets setback, noise, size and other design standards for wind turbines on residential property.

The town joins Damariscotta, Eliot and Wiscasset in adopting such an ordinance.

While the cost of energy is rapidly becoming a political issue of serious consequence -- for example, pitting prominent Republicans who favor expanding oil drilling off the nation's coastline against prominent Democrats who reject it -- this expansion of alternative energy opportunities in Maine is not about politics at all.

Instead, it's about the options chosen by those with little choice but to change, innovate and, ultimately, choose a more sustainable way of keeping warm.

That's not political; it's just common sense, with which Mainers are once again proving themselves amply endowed.