Activist-filmmaker Josh Fox isnt resting on his laurels. Or on anything, anywhere, ever. He doesnt seem quite capable of rest. When I arrive at his home office a stones throw from the Brooklyn Navy Yard the location of New Yorks Democratic debate earlier this month it is one day before the New York primary, I am ten minutes late, and Fox, restless, has decided not to let any seconds be wasted by not working.
Im just in the middle of something, Ill be with you in a minute, he calls out. Adjacent to the eclectic living room black and white graffiti sprawls across one wall is a small, ad-hoc AV room, the size of a closet, and in it Fox is wrapping up his latest Bernie Sanders pitch video.
Feel the Bern, he enjoins in his voiceover, or else you might feel this burn. An image flashes on-screen, by now familiar to anyone whos followed the anti-fracking movement. A man with a blond mustache turns on his faucet, and recoils as his tap water is lit on fire. Theres natural gas leaking into and through his water pipes, gas made unstable and deleterious by the process of fracking, the natural gas industrys controversial method of extracting fossil fuel from below homes, yards and even federally protected land an environmental gamble Fox helped make famous with his Oscar-nominated 2010 documentary Gasland.
What's Killing the Babies of Vernal, Utah?The 15 Best Whistling Songs of All TimeKiss' Top 10 Albums Ranked
Bernie Sanders is the only 2016 candidate whos solidly anti-fracking, and Fox recently went from fan to endorser to actual campaign surrogate, joining the ranks of Susan Sarandon, Danny DeVito and Spike Lee.
Its an especially hectic time for Fox to be taking on new responsibilities considering that his latest film, How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Cant Change, opened at New Yorks IFC Center this week, and debuts on HBO in June. Youd call it a perfect storm, if provocative work like How to Let Go which goes beyond fracking to look at the whole, sometimes overwhelming, issue of climate change hadnt made you feel the weight of using the words perfect and storm together.
Fox agreed to chat with Rolling Stone about his new film, working with Team Bernie and how to power through feelings of despair we all might feel about the state of our planet.
How did your involvement with the Sanders campaign come about? Did you offer yourself to them?
They reached out to me. I got an email when I was at Sundance, reaching out on fracking. Bill McKibben [who appears in How To Let Go of the World] has been close with the campaign, and his focus is climate, and he just wrote this huge piece in The Nation about fracking, so he may have pointed them in my direction. I was really grateful though. Because most of the time, the candidates go to the wrong people. Theyll go to the Big Greens, who are sort of namby-pamby on climate. This campaign is really different. Theyre reaching out to grassroots leaders who really know whats going on, rather than going to the inside-the-Beltway environmental groups who dont always have the strongest positions.
And Sanders is the first major presidential candidate to come out against fracking, right?
Hallelujah! Its a big deal. I mean, Hillary Clinton, when she got up and talked about fracking at the first debate, it was a bunch of gobbledygook that came out of her mouth, and those are the moral somersaults that youre doing when youre trying to justify any fracking at all. Shes proposing this natural gas bridge to the future, which is of course the same thing that Obama is doing. And when you say, Oh, its a bridge to clean energy, that sounds like something relatively short. Oh, well just go across the bridge and get to the other side. But what that really is is a 40-year overhaul of American energy, to convert to natural gas. You dont build 300 fracked gas power plants and then dismantle them five years later. Theyre gonna last three to four decades. Thats the way theyre financed. And thats dishonest, when you say, Oh, its a temporary thing, and then all of a sudden youre hooked. Youve hooked the entire society on a fuel that is the worst fuel for climate change.
What do you like better about Sanders position?
Bernie is saying, We have to go to 100 percent renewable energy, and we have to do it as fast as possible. Thats not an easy thing. But then again, neither is encountering the reality of where were at with climate change. Bernie has correctly come out and identified thisas the number-one security threat to the United States. And he invoked FDR, who overhauled the entire American economy to defeat fascism in Europe, and that is the correct mindset. We need that kind of FDR-like mobilization on renewable and on climate.
Ive often thought about that similarity between converting war plants and overhauling the grid. My grandmother was a Rosie the Riveter, in a GE plant. They just said, Stop making washing machines. Start making turbine engines.
Exactly. I gave a speech about this the other day, but I was paraphrasing Lester Brown, the great climate analyst. The story goes like this: FDR identified that we were going to have to fight. And he went to the auto industry and he said, Were going to need you to start building planes, and tanks, and guns, because we have to defeat this enemy in Europe. And the auto industry looked at him and said, Alright, Mr. President. Well try. But its going to be hard to do that while were making all these cars for Americans. And FDR said, You dont understand. Were gonna ban the sale of private automobiles in this country. And they were like, Oh. And at that moment, Americans realized, OK. The only way we get through this is if we win this war. And thats the same crisis now with climate change. We have to win the war against emissions. The only way we do that is by a radical and very fast overhaul. Is it possible? Of course its possible. The only thing we can do at this late stage, at this stage of emergency, is a complete overhaul. Thats whats exciting, and thats whats daunting, but thats what needs to be done.
Thats a place where I really see your film and the Sanders campaign as being in synch. Your film is one of the first places where Ive seen people talking seriously about needing to do something on climate change within the next four years. Climate accords usually talk about targets being reached by 2050, but your film talks about us needing to do something much sooner, like by 2020.
Without a doubt. Weve warmed the Earth by one degree already. We have enough methane and carbon dioxide in the air and warmth and heat in the oceans right now to bring us to 1.5 degrees. At two degrees, we lose 30 to 50 percent of the species on the planet, we have most of our major coastal cities partially submerged. We have increased flooding, increased infectious diseases, 780 million climate refugees will be displaced. We simply dont have any time left.
What if we dont get it done?
Human beings, as [jailed environmental activist] Tim DeChristopher says in the movie, are going to navigate the most intense period of change that civilization has ever seen. It may in fact destroy civilization. What does that mean? My film is about all the things climate cant change. Its about a set of principles: courage, human rights, democracy, innovation, creativity, resilience, love. These are the things that were going to need to guide us through that climate catastrophe. Were going to need those values if were going to win anything at all. But were going to need them even more if we start to really lose.
Lose how?
Well heres the worst vision for me of climate: Its whats happening in Syria. The Syrian Civil War started with the worst drought in that countrys history. That set off a chain reaction of political repression. Political repression is not a climate problem; its a human problem. If we dont start to talk about the values that are opposed to that, climate will make those situations worse. My worst-nightmare situation for that was Hurricane Katrina where you had a city that went underwater because of a storm, and all those inner-city people were told, Leave your drowning city. Get on this bridge and walk across to the suburbs. And as you remember, they were met on the other side by the white, suburban police force, with shotguns, telling them to go back and drown. That wasnt a climate problem. That was a collapse of values. It was a collapse of ethics. It was a collapse of our own basic decency. For me, talking about climate leads us to talk about, how do we leave our humanity intact, even though some of our cities wont survive? Its not time to get ready the shotgun and the closet full of ammunition. Its time to get ready the spare bedroom, and the extra seat at the table.
The film has this beautiful Beckett-esque I cant go on; I must go on moment at its heart.
Youre not the only person to say that. A small-town mayor in Abita Springs, Louisiana, came up to me and said, Its that Beckett thing! I cant go on; I must go on! You are right. And Im very proud of that. Because oftentimes when we talk about climate, we get into this tennis match between denial and despair. And this movie tries to punch through and say, Its OK. Go through it. Theres something on the other side thats deeper.
Ive often thought, though, that climate denialists almost seem like the happy folks. The left is shouting, The end is near! while the right is having a bake sale and saying, Everything is OK! Isnt it hard to be the person trying to get people to look at a difficult reality?
It is hard. Its hard for me. I practically quit in the middle of the movie. But when I get overwhelmed and I think its too late, I have to ask, What are the things that climate change cant destroy? And the question really is, Whats so deep within us that no storm can take it away? And when you think about it in those terms, it really is centering. DeChristopher says in the film, I stopped trying to avoid despair, and then I stopped trying to get through despair, and then I just picked it up and carried it with me everywhere I went. And I had to find a place in my heart for despair. And he says, in happy times, that weight is oppressive, but in stormy times, that weight is an anchor that can get you through.
I really think of this film as Return of the Jedi, and those are the Jedi: Tim DeChristopher, the Pacific Climate Warriors, the indigenous environmental monitors in the Amazon who are trekking miles into the jungle to find oil spills, the wisdom of the people in the Rockaways in New York City. Youve got a discussion of values in the most urban setting in New York City, and its mirroring a discussion of values among indigenous people in the Amazon. And I think the time has come for that discussion. And, its really wild, Im walking around New York these days and I feel like people are like, Hey! Sanders! Psst! Its like the underground resistance! I feel like Im in that TV show The Prisoner, where people had all these secret ways of letting each other know that theyre on the same side. People see my Sanders shirt or my Sanders button, and its like Hey! Psst! Sanders!
Did you get to talk to Sanders when you introduced him at his rally in Binghamton recently?
I did! He signed my banjo.
[He shows me the banjo. Where Woody Guthries instrument said on its outside curve This machine kills fascists, Foxs simply says, Bernie Sanders.]
Sanders is already the president of this progressive movement.
Now thatthe New York primary has come and gone, and Bernie lost, people are questioning his chances. What if he loses or drops out? What then?
Bernie has already won. Whats happening is that its becoming increasingly clear that both parties feel that to maintain their platforms, they have to exclude voters. Its become an insular popularity contest. Some 126,000voters were [removed from the Democratic voter rollsbefore Tuesdays primary vote]in Brooklyn.What does it mean to be a citizen if you cant vote in the most important election of your life? And Im not even talking about Clinton/Trump, Im talking about Clinton/Sanders. Ill answer your question, but I have a question: What does it mean for the planet when the climate has no candidate? Because Hillary Clintons climate plan actually makes things worse.
But seriously, what if? Ifit does come down to Clinton/Trump, what happens to all those people energized by Sanders?
Look, the BernieSanders campaign is made of these movements that are already incredibly strong: the climate movement, the anti-fracking movement, Black Lives Matter, Occupy, all coming together under the big tent of the Sanders campaign. And hes been saying these things for 30 years. Its not like he came out of nowhere. But for a lot of people, its like discovering buried treasure all of a sudden. So thats not going anywhere no matter what,because it was all already there. Its just getting stronger. AndI think the more ridiculous and absurd these contests become, the stronger the movement gets. People see thatDemocratic incrementalism, plus Republican obstructionism, has failed to protect us. It hasfailed to protect us fromclimate change, from the big banks, from big corporations. Bernie is offering solutions. But if they dont let him in, by excluding these movements, these movements will continue to participate. I think the real power in this country is with the movements. Real power in America isnt in the White House. Real power is in the streets. And Sanders is already the president of this progressive movement.
What would you say to those who might tend toward despair?
Iwould say we didnt have despair last night [at the IFC Center screening of How to Let Go, introduced by Susan Sarandon].We haddancing and singing. Progressive politics is alive and well in America. Its there. If you stay in your house and stay on Facebook all day, if you wall yourself off in your cul-de-sac, youll be depressed. But if you go out, youll discover it. Theres rallies in the day and theres rallies at night. And theres joy. Theres incredible joy in it. I watched last night people dancing in the streets to Prince. AndI heard six conversations on the street last night just going from my office to the sound studio about voter disenfranchisement. If we continue to be excluded from the process, democracy is insuppressible. We need it like water. If it comes down to an election between Hillary andTrump, it will be an election between two of the most hated presidential candidates of all time. I will do everything in my power to make sure aRepublican is not elected, if it comes to that, but its not over for Bernie. Its only gonna get wackier from here.
CanI just add that Im really mourning Prince? Because hes the guy who got every dance party started.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.