reached out to the Department of City Planning for comment. In an email to, a National Grid spokesperson said, “All work is done in accordance with permits and guidelines for conducting work in NYC streets.”Anna Tsomo, 22, is a senior studying at City University in New York. She moved to New York from Kentucky, where she grew up organizing against mountaintop removal and fossil fuel extraction.
“I study public health,” she noted. “There’s a ton of intersecting issues around what I’m learning in school and what I see day-to-day in my life here around environmental racism, allocations of resources by the city government, federal government, and the level of corruption and the level of power that the fossil fuel industry really has.”
And they’re cognizant of how different demonstrations might play out in different communities. In Brownsville, a majority-Black neighborhood, Tsomo said organizers stayed away from direct actions like disrupting construction sites because they didn’t want to bring law enforcement into an already over-policed community. Brownsville instead held aThe hard work appears to be paying off.
And organizers say that ending these projects is just the start of what they want to see. The list of demands Tsomo and Rodriguez have been yelling into megaphones for months includes not just stopping the pipeline, but also transitioning to publicly controlled power — i.e.,— and implementing a Green New Deal that centers Black, brown, Indigenous, and working-class communities.
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