A Conversation with Josh Fox (THE EDGE OF NATURE)

While Josh Fox might be best known for his documentaries – from 2010’s Oscar-nominated surprise hit Gasland right through to 2017’s Awake, A Dream From Standing Rock (made in collaboration with Doug Good Feather and Myron Dewey, who also served as EP on this latest) – filmmaking for the veteran director-writer-environmental activist has always been more means to an end than conscious pursuit. Indeed, Fox is a live performer at heart, and continues to serve as the producing artistic director of International WOW Company, which he founded nearly thirty years back (and has since toured with throughout Europe, Asia and of course the US).

Which makes The Edge of Nature, a documentary theater piece that had its world-premiering run at La MaMa in NYC, an artistic culmination rather than diversion. (A critically-acclaimed one at that. Reviews even included a “great work” quote from Bernie Sanders, who Fox wrote parts of the Democratic platform on energy and environment for in 2016; Fox also receives funding from The Sanders Institute.) It’s also a wildly ambitious, and surprisingly successful, attempt to connect seemingly disparate subjects: long Covid – which prompted Fox to seek healing in his beloved Pennsylvania woods, isolated with only a camera and a variety of forest friends; the Native American genocide (of which the late Myron Dewey of the Walker River Paiute Tribe was a survivor); the Holocaust (Fox’s father fled the Nazis as a child, thus making him a survivor); and ongoing environmental devastation (save for the period of the “anthropause,” the first six to eight months of pandemic lockdown that resulted in worldwide emissions being reduced enough to actually halt climate change. Yes, the environment can survive if we prioritize).

The multimedia spectacle likewise includes an 11-member ensemble from International WOW, who along with the banjo-playing Fox, use American folk music (score by musician-composer-producer Dougie Bowne of the Lounge Lizards) to guide us through the first-person documentary journey that unfolds onscreen above the stage, hovering like a cinematic conscience for us all.

Hammer to NaiI: was surprised to learn that you founded International WOW Company back in 1996, which made me wonder why you turned to filmmaking in the first place, after such a long career in NYC theater. 

Josh Fox: Until 2005, when I shot this film called Memorial Day, theater was always the most accessible form of art for me. Then everything changed. Francis Ford Coppola saw the camcorder and said, and I’m paraphrasing, “Someday some kid is going to take this thing and make a movie for five bucks and it’s going to be seen by the whole world and go all the way to the Oscars.” And that’s what happened with Gasland – we made that movie for less than five bucks.

And so that part of my life was really just about using the tools that were in front of me as an artist. I like to make things in the room. I like questions. I like to plumb the depths. I like investigations. The thought of making a traditional film where everything is planned out, where you have storyboards, where you have to sort of do everything without being in the room with it – I find that very stultifying.

I love the ideas of Mike Leigh. I love the precedents that were set by Jean-Luc Godard in that respect. When you arrive on the set and you then are able to take those questions with you, and explore them in the room with other artists. That’s what I love. So that was the process of making The Edge of Nature, exploring it in the room with these incredible musicians. And the film was there as a template, which was great. But some things from the film were changed. As you saw, there’s the sequence on phytoplankton that’s in the play but not in the film. But now those changes will go into the film.

HtN: So this is an evolving work, and an organic process as well.

JF: I like that about it. We have that luxury right now. Obviously at some point in time you solidify it and then you say, “Okay, that’s enough.” And you move on to the next thing.

HtN: And when you shot all the footage, you were alone in the woods recovering from Covid – or was someone filming with you?

JF: Oh, no, no, no. I was alone. If anybody was there, they would’ve been credited in the movie.

HtN: You were there primarily to heal from the myriad symptoms of long Covid.

JF: One of the doctors says in the film that long Covid can have some aspects of PTSD, or long Covid can invoke PTSD. So in many ways I think what I experienced can be explained by some of the long Covid symptoms that are neurological, and/or by the PTSD that long Covid can bring about.

And then there’s the PTSD from being attacked by the oil industry for 10 years nonstop around the clock: death threats, arson, threats to my body, to my family, to my reputation certainly. And constant anti-Semitism, constant. When you’re in that kind of brutal battle against the most powerful industry on the face of the planet, it adds up.

When I look at some of the photographs of me in those last days when I was at Standing Rock, after having done basically a 10-year battle against the oil industry, I don’t look very good. I look battered and bruised and roughed up. And that’s what I say in the film – that we had nosed in headfirst and brain-first, and got beaten up and bludgeoned and traumatized. And that is a part of the constant battle of fighting for the planet. Not just physical and mental trauma, but people actually suffer enormously psychologically from that. 

So I think what was happening to me was that I had long Covid symptoms, and I also had an avalanche of post-traumatic stress disorder – and intergenerational trauma that came out of nowhere. My conversation with (EP) Myron Dewey was a lot about intergenerational trauma.

HtN: And the message of the film, as you say, is this idea of healing ourselves through healing the planet, and vice-versa. Of bringing people back to the role of caretaker of the land as opposed to conquerors.

JF: We have to understand that we garden this planet. And all of the things that happen on this planet are a result of political choices. 

The colonists described coming up on the shores of this continent, and seeing fires all along the coast. Why? Because Native Americans were burning off the underbrush for farming. They were maintaining and managing the forest. This idea of the “great American wilderness” is a total lie – right along with the Native American “savage” and the doctrine of “discovery.” The Europeans love hedgerows and fences, and they love to own land and cordon it off, and they believe every animal is their property. The Europeans killed off 300 million beavers in this country. Billions of passenger pigeons went extinct. Millions upon millions of bison, all the gray wolves, billions of prairie dogs. This was an eradication and a genocide of what we call nature.

These forests here in Pennsylvania were clearcut. So finding that huge tree that I filmed, that has clearly lasted hundreds of years, was an amazing revelation: “That tree is a survivor. I’m a survivor. Myron Dewey, my advisor from the Payute Nation, is a survivor of the American genocide.” And then drawing those connections together over that period of investigation, realizing how the scars were and the land were…The landscape was literally teaching me that.

HtN: But you’re also juggling a lot of threads as a result. You’ve got the Native American genocide, you’ve got the Holocaust, you’ve got environmental climate destruction. That seems to me like a lot of material to pack into one film.

JF: It took a long time to figure out how to braid those strands of meaning together. My friend Jenny Golden, the great editor of Watchers of the Sky, came to the show during the LaMaMa run and was surprised by all the different directions I went in. But then she said, “Well, you landed all the planes.” And that’s the struggle, right? It’s not just figuring out a simple single issue that’s easy to tackle. Maybe if you’re asking something like, “Is fracking good or bad?” Okay, that’s pretty easy to figure out after a six or eight month investigation.

Not so if you’re trying to figure out what is nature, what is our civilization’s relationship to it, and what is our role as human beings; and also explore the haunting specter of what it is to be the next generation survivor of the Holocaust growing up in the land of genocide. It’s ironic that we’re speaking on July 4th. This is a big strand in environmentalism right now, figuring out colonialism’s relationship to the forest and to the people who took care of this continent for thousands of years. They had a starkly different ideology than the colonists, and that’s reflected in the landscape.

HtN: It’s definitely a worldwide movement right now, especially in documentaries. I was just thinking that there’s a bunch of environmental docs, really great ones out there that are trying to reposition people back into nature, “un-separate” humans from nature. Making sure that we know that we’re not separate entities.

JF: It’s second nature for us to understand this. I think we know this intrinsically, we just don’t have a language for understanding it in most of the European languages. I think that it’s very clear.

That’s why we need art. We need art to translate.

JF: Yeah, exactly. That’s the point of this movie. And the most influential film to me in its creation was Exterminate All the Brutes. I don’t know if you’ve seen it.

Raoul Peck.

JF: Yeah, Raoul Peck’s fascinating series about genocide. When I sent a cut to Jesse Weinraub at HBO very early in the process, he recommended I watch it. And after Standing Rock I continued to work with Myron Dewey and Doug Goodfeather, my two Native American collaborators on Awake, which is on Netflix, for many years teaching Native American youth media and on other projects. I had a very intense conversation with Myron about this idea of intergenerational trauma, because it’s something that brings Jews and Native Americans into a close dialogue with one other. It was interesting to realize that this commonality was something special that needed to be brought out.

 

And then of course you have Donald Trump out there, who’s being a very overt racist and also quite clearly an exploiter of land, an exploiter of people. And that contradiction and that contrast was so evident to me. But it was also very weird to see that these Trump-supporting people who love the forest, who are my neighbors, who clearly love hunting and fishing and being in the woods, that they were just so wanting to kill everything all the time. They wanted to kill the beavers and the bears. I was like, “What the fuck are you doing? What’s going on here? What is this?” And then I realized, oh my God, these are the descendants of those genocidal colonialists. That is who they are.

HtN: That conquering, not care-taking instinct.

JF: Yeah, literally, they are the ideological and genealogical descendants of the genocidal colonialists who took over this land. And I am not, right? My family fled the Nazis. My father escaped the Nazis and escaped the anti-Semites in Europe. My oldest uncle, who died when I was a child, was shot in the face in Poland after the war. And so these are things that we grew up with at the dinner table. 

You grow up with Auschwitz, with the genocide, with the gas chambers; and you also grow up with a hyper-vigilance. All of the things that I did on fracking, the prescience that I understand about climate change, is because I have the hyper-vigilance of an intergenerational trauma victim. When you have intergenerational trauma, you’re constantly scanning the horizon for threats. And it is so clear to me that the biggest threat that we face right now is species and interspecies-wide annihilation.

HtN: Well, you’re using that knowledge to a positive end. It’s a whole other conversation with Israel, a nation of intergenerational trauma using it to insane ends.

JF: Well, I don’t want to talk about Israel, and I don’t think that’s part of this question.

HtN: Okay, we won’t talk about that. But I am a Jew as well, so I’ve been noticing this.

JF: Look, I see a very divided left right now. I see a very obsessed with attacking each other left. And to me, this is the singing solidarity contribution that I have. 

My last film How to Let Go of the World was the dancing film, this is the singing film. And my great friend Tim DeChristopher, who spent two years in a federal prison for disrupting an oil and gas auction, his organization Peaceful Uprising used to say, “We will be a movement when we sing like a movement.” I believe in protests that sing. If you’re not able to sing at your protest, I don’t know what kind of protest it is and I probably don’t want to join. So this to me is about reaching back to that great American tradition of those socialist protest songs that are part of our American history, from Pete Seeger to Woody Guthrie, and down to us here.

And that tradition was very important to pair with this film about nature. We can have solidarity and we will be a movement when we sing like a movement, and when we get the audience singing. I found that I wanted to work with singers. I wanted to work with musicians. I wanted to work with people who were going to literally change the molecules in the air. And so that’s where I landed with this. That act of singing, that act of changing the room through that is something I find can help us heal some of the wounds; and help us understand that we can work together.

HtN: It’s interesting that you brought up the music because I was wondering how that worked. You have rights to all the music?

JF: There’s two basic strands of music in the film. There’s the folk stuff, which is from Pete Seeger and a great banjo player named Lucas Poole. And then there’s the traditional. In the film it’s Pete Seeger. In the play we are just playing traditional songs.

And then there’s the score, which is by Dougie Bowne, who was actually the former sessions drummer for the Lounge Lizards. He worked with Iggy Pop and John Cale and Cibo Matto, and was one of the most sought-after drummers in all of New York City. But then he got a traumatic brain injury and couldn’t play the drums anymore. So he started to do compositions. 

We initially met through Sean Lennon, when I was working with Sean and Yoko on Artists Against Fracking, and we became friends. And then during Covid I started to notice that he had been doing all these collaborations on his Instagram. I asked if I could use some of it for the movie, and he offered to write me new music instead. So I sent him all these banjo compositions that I had been working on with bows, cello and just weird stuff. He took that and grabbed fragments, recreated all this incredible music, and put orchestrations to it to create this extraordinary score. The banjo heavy soundtrack that Dougie created combined with Pete Seeger’s music just works together beautifully. 

So yes, for the movie, we have the rights to all the music. I work with great music clearance people. But I also toured with Pete Seeger towards the end of his life –  we put him in Gasland. He was a very passionate person fighting for action in New York. I was so lucky to be able to perform with him on several occasions, and learn a lot of lessons from him. The last concert he played in 2014 at Farm Aid, he actually changed the words to “This Land is Your Land” and made it “This land was made to be frack-free.” That was a huge moment right before he died at 94 in 2014. 

And remember, Pete Seeger was blacklisted for 16 years because he refused to testify at the McCarthy hearings. It broke up The Weavers and took him off the circuit, he couldn’t be on TV for 16 years. He couldn’t play at Carnegie Hall and do all the things that he was really renowned for.

So what does he do? He went from high school to kindergarten class, to farm to backyard, and he taught kids “This Land is Your Land,” which is a song that no publisher would pick up. Class by class he taught it, and soon the schoolteachers started to request the lyrics. One school at a time it became America’s unofficial national anthem. Well, I was one of those kindergarten kids – so I started to know Pete Seeger from the age of five years old. 

Right now we are in a similar situation in the documentary community, in the film world as a whole. We are seeing corporate greed on the same level that you’re seeing in other major corporate endeavors; and a huge downturn in independent distribution, which we need to correct. Our culture needs deep movies not bubblegum, so I need distribution for this desperately. We’re also trying to mobilize to bring the show to Broadway. We’ll see what happens.

HtN: But you’ve got film festivals you’re going –

JF: None, none in America, even though I really think we have an urgent message. Obviously I’ve been a very popular filmmaker for my whole career, and I don’t see why this would be any different. But I think documentary and filmmaking overall, and I want to underline this, needs a live component right now.

People understand live. When you called to set up this interview you brought up Sam Green and mentioned that, “This is the future.” I completely agree. Touring nonstop has been a fundamental component of not only our audience outreach, but our political success. Our films have changed laws, they’ve organized and they’ve mobilized. And the bottom line is we are trying to push all of that with this work. 

We do have a lot of invitations from activists all across the country. We have Sierra Club involvement, and we have the Sanders Institute, Bernie Sanders organization. But we don’t have the foundations coming in, and we still need funding. I’m trying to reverse engineer a distribution plan through the theater, and I continue to apply to foundations, but nature bats last. Whether it was fracking or climate change or Standing Rock, people saw the threat. But when it’s “We’ve got to fight for our forests,” people are like, “What?”

Usually the way we run our tours is we have the movies paid for by a major distributor – which did not happen in this case. We then have foundations come in to give us grants to hire staff to book the tour, and to connect with all the activist groups across the country. Each one of our stops has five or six different organizations that are fighting fracking or coal or a pipeline, or for some environmental cause. And those groups band together – get a hall or a backyard, a barn or a big theater, a library or whatever – and then we show up for free. We don’t make any money off of touring, because the foundations basically only cover our expenses. But we changed the world.

– Lauren Wissot