Josh Fox - The Truth Has Changed

Josh Fox is a remarkable human being , and this is a remarkable document, bringing together his many lives: artist, truth teller, campaigner. These are not, it turns out, different tasks. Theyre the same job, on different days.

Mostly the world got to know Josh through GASLAND, his documentary account of the fracking boom across America. Back before most people knew it was going on, and certainly before most people sensed any trouble, Josh had traveled to the rural margins of an increasingly urban and suburban nation, and brought back the goods: the science about what happened when you blew apart the subsurface geology to get at gas, but also the picture of what happened to communities, and to individual lives. And he brought back the clip: of a man lighting his faucet on fire. That moment summed up an entire technologyindeed, an entire careless greedy approach to the world around us.

That he had struck a nerve was obviousthe reaction from the oil and gas industry was immediate and overwhelming: Orwellian truth squads to try and cover up the facts, constant campaigns of harassment, expensive efforts to silence him and his colleagues. Believe me, this kind of pressure is hard to endure. But hes been able toindeed, over time it may have freed him to act with a kind of compassion and conviction that goes beyond even the normal realm of the documentarian.

Wherever people are trying to stand up to the power of the fossil fuel industry, thats where hes been. In Louisiana, where new gas plants and oil pipelines are under siege. At Standing Rock, in the ultimate confrontation with the naked power of the worlds richest industry. In the Caribbean after Maria, where the full strength of a warmed ocean had been on display. Hes always got his camera (at a memorable protest outside the worlds largest coal port in Australia, he managed to flip it to a friend in a neighboring boat just as the police craft rammed into his vessel). But hes also always got his wits about himthe artistic sense that served him well in his years as a director, and that has allowed him to tell the stories he now witnesses in a vernacular that can and does penetrate.

Not many Americans have seen as much as Josh Fox has in recent yearsnot many white Americans, anyway. And you could forgive him if hed turned bitter, turned in on himself. It is noteworthy, and even noble, that he has taken the opposite tack, becoming ever more immersed in the hurly-burly of our political life. In the time of Trump, thats no small gift to the Republic, for we need people with his slashing ability to communicate across the sea of idiocy that threatens to numb us all. Art is for breaking through numbness, and Josh Fox is an artist above all. That his art flows from fact, from science, from study makes it not dry and academic but immediate and desperate and necessary.

PART ONE

The Stage is bare except for a small desk, center. Water projection screens rigged in nine positions all around the stage. When all the water screens are turned on at once it is as if the stage is raining.

PROLOGUE

Rain and windshield wipers.

How do we know whats true?

Josh raises his hand, like a student asking a question.

2012.

Interstate 95. In the car, the question is going over and over in my mind, like the windshield wipers clicking back and forth. Its coming on nightfall, and the winds are picking up. It feels like its 3 a.m. Somehow it always feels like its 3 a.m.

Im on tour, speaking with students about my films, and I cant get one students question out of my mind. Her hand was the first up at the end of the film. How do we know whats true? Shes a senior at Sweet Briar College in Virginia, located on an old-fashioned plantation, left over from the Civil War. Its an all-female college with an equine studies program. The cost of tuition is over $50,000 a year. The students here are so wealthy that they have their own horses. They ride to their classes.

You say all of these things about how fracking is bad and climate change is real, but then we read on the Internet that all the opposite of those things are true. So how do we know? These kids have every possible resource at their disposal; every resource, it seems, except a mechanism for knowing whats true.

I begin to answer, when I realize that I cant properly answer this question, or at least not quickly.