After being nominated for an Academy Award, you’d think everything would be peachy for Josh Fox. But after his documentary Gasland was nominated in 2011 for an Oscar, Fox received a lot more hate than his fellow nominees. “The oil and gas industry threatened me and my family. They made two feature films calling me a liar. They published articles saying I was funded by Vladimir Putin.” Fox accepted that he had made powerful enemies by trying to expose the evils of fracking. What startled Fox was in 2016, he saw the same misinformation techniques put forth in the 2016 election. “All the same people who came after me Steve Bannon, Breitbart, Cambridge Analytica, shifted their focus on getting Donald Trump elected.”
Out of this realization came his one man show, The Truth Has Changed which will be performed March 13-15 at MDC Live Arts Lab and March 20-22 at The Light Box. It is a multimedia performance utilizing music and film, but mostly features Josh Fox explaining why due to climate change our world is going down in flames. Or in Miami’s case going down in a rising tide. “The show is a wake up call. But it is also uplifting because you’ll be in the room with people who want to do something about it.”
Fox was originally commissioned to do the show for an HBO television special. He created something influenced by Spalding Gray’s one man show Swimming to Cambodia. When the television plans fell apart he decided to take The Truth Has Changed on the road. “The primary issue in the piece is how the oil and gas industries, big data, and white supremacy are working together. We’re going to need a program of civilization-wide change. Something like the Green New Deal is the only thing that will work fast enough to keep Miami above water. We need a World War 2 style mobilization. We have to treat fighting climate change like we fought Hitler.”
Fox says the show is not a didactic lecture. “I think you need a division between art and activism. The play is about the emotional struggle in how do we live in a world if we can’t understand what’s happening?” After each performance will be a discussion featuring different Miami environmental campaigns, that will be about activism rather than art.
Fox hopes the show will persuade people of the urgency of our predicament. “Climate chaos will lead to as many deaths as World War 2. Miami very soon will be completely underwater if we don’t do anything about it.”
