Peter Rugh

Seven of Canada’s most prized scientific libraries are being shut down and some of their contents have already been burned, thrown away or carted off by fossil fuel consultancy firms.

Three and a half months ago, the walls upstairs at the Church of the Prophecy in Far Rockaway, a low-income coastal neighborhood of New York City, were covered with maps of where help was most needed. The church was a hub for the Occupy Sandy relief effort after Hurricane Sandy. Now, nearly five months after the hurricane struck, the maps have been replaced by posters extolling the virtues of collective struggle and art made by neighborhood children enrolled in Occupy Sandy’s twice-weekly after-school program.

It was Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, and the sound of pounding drums mingled with subway steel rattling underground, sending a hot pulse through the high-arched edifice of a humble house of worship in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. As Nina Simone sang in her blue soliloquy to the slain civil rights leader, “The king of love is dead.” But here, in St. Jacobi Lutheran Church, one could feel King’s heart beat on.

The stakes are high for people in the Rockaways. More than month and a half after Superstorm Sandy, winter is setting in and many of the ten thousand residents of this Queens neighborhood still lack heat or electricity…Now, supported by Occupy Sandy volunteers, residents of the Rockaways are starting to fight back.

A month after Frankenstorm Sandy struck, battle lines are beginning to be drawn in the wreckage along New York City’s shores.