Poison Route

On a sweltering June day, a high-spirited group of about 50 activists and local residents gathered on the edge of a park in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brownsville. Many were wheeling bikes with colorful flags that read “Poison Route” and “Ruta Venenosa,” referring to the streets that have been overturned to make way for a pipeline that is expected to funnel fracked gas through largely low-income, Black and brown communities in North Brooklyn. The plan was to bike along the seven-mile route of the nearly finished pipeline, from Brownsville the Greenpoint—to more clearly visualize and expose this environmental injustice. Threaded through the spokes of one bike, a sliver of cardboard read “Black Lives Matter,” underscoring the connection between this effort and the protests taking place across the city and around the world in the wake of George Floyd’s brutal killing in late May.

The story of the North Brooklyn pipeline, which the utility corporation National Grid opaquely named the Metropolitan Natural Gas Infrastructure Project, is familiar in many ways. Across the country, low-income neighborhoods of color are frequently targeted for fossil fuel infrastructure—to the point where a 2017 report found that, in some states, one in five Black Americans