Outside New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s midtown Manhattan office this week, a man expressed concern about six women who weren’t getting enough to eat. He wasn’t too interested in hearing why, though, and after a few minutes of remonstration he hurried on. Other bystanders were more open-minded. They asked questions. Most didn’t know much about the problem, but some wanted to learn more.

The six women, all part of the Stop the Williams Pipeline Coalition, were fasting in protest, demanding that Cuomo deny a water permit for a proposed pipeline in New York Bay, off the coast of the Rockaways, to be built by the Tulsa, Oklahoma-based Williams Company. The women’s action was the latest in long-running grassroots struggle in New York State — and worldwide — against fracked gas and its infrastructure. It was also yet another sign that the global movement to address the climate crisis is getting increasingly serious and confrontational.

One of the hunger strikers, Joan Flynn, seventy-one, lives in the Rockaways, a peninsula that forms part of southern Queens. She knows firsthand what a difference good policy can make. Since the 1972 expansion of the Clean Water Act, she explains, the Atlantic Ocean has been much cleaner. Without municipal waste, PCBs, or Agent Orange, the saltwater ecosystems around New York City have been gradually recovering for years. In the last decade, “the marine life has had a chance to come back, in just remarkable ways,” she said. “We see whales!” Flynn’s face lights up. About two years ago, she recalls leaving the beach, her back to the ocean. “I was at the top of the dune, and I heard a collective ‘ohhhh’ from all the people on the beach, and there was the whale.” She motioned with her hand, to illustrate the dramatic sight of that fluke.