Fox Green’s creative output is prolific because it’s urgent. The American empire is at a difficult and pivotal moment in history, and Green seeks to help lead the public toward “a more prosperous future for a shared community of one mankind.”
To that end, the Kingston resident has embarked on an intellectual journey rooted in Hudson Valley history yet connected to issues that affect the nation, and indeed the globe.
His Space Commune podcast and Energy/Empire documentary series dive deep into history, power structures and politics, particularly around the topic of energy. Green also leads the New York Energy Alliance, which advocates for policy changes toward a more prosperous future for the public.
On Saturday, Nov. 8, Green will screen the latest installment of the Energy/Empire series at the Kingston Library. A panel discussion will follow, featuring Green; the president and business manager of IBEW Local 320, an electrical workers union; and Jillian Fried, leader of the No Battery Plant on Hurley Avenue initiative.
In conversation, Green’s passion is matched with sophisticated subject knowledge and wisdom gleaned from scrutinizing the past, present and possible future through a humanitarian lens.
Your Energy/Empire documentary series is a deeply researched and provocative piece of journalistic work that challenges many preconceptions about the history of energy development and environmentalism in New York, and indeed across the world. It has a local focus while tackling global issues. What motivated you — particularly as a Hudson Valley resident — to make this documentary series?
Fox Green: When we hear the term ‘fake news’ we often limit this concept to headlines we’ve seen this week, this month, this year, or in the best case, perhaps spanning our whole lifetime. But fake news goes back throughout the course of human history. If we don’t understand our own history, how can we make decisions about the current moment? If we don’t know how we got here, how can we make the best decision about where we want to go, how we want to shape our shared future?
The Hudson Valley’s history is America’s history. America’s history is world history. We are in a position to effect positive change that reverberates both inward locally and outward globally, but only if we can correctly evaluate the historical context of the situation we are in.
Most people recognize that our community is changing in a way that could have potentially dire consequences for the future. Many feel an urgency to act, but they are not quite sure what to do. The only way to do so effectively is by shirking off the ‘fake news’ of our own regional and national history. To become effective historical actors in our own time we must have the context to know where real American republican ideals, principles on which our nation was founded, went off the rails. My goal with this documentary series is to anchor Americans in local, national and ultimately world history.
Since 2020, energy prices in the Hudson Valley have gone up 49.6%, compared to 43.8% at the state level and 29.2% at the national level. As an expert on the energy industry, are we just victims or circumstance, or could we be doing something more to lower our energy costs?
Animals are victims of circumstance. They are subject to nature’s conditions because they cannot conceive of potential in the future. Mankind alone has the ability to transform our environment through creative discovery and technological advance. The history of humankind is empirical evidence of this reality. Despite forecasters throughout history, such as British economist Thomas Malthus, or Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich, human beings have never succumbed to a tipping point of outstripping our food or “resources.”
Right here in the Hudson Valley, we have a rich history of transforming our environment to create more abundance by lowering the cost of energy, which raised our standard of living and raised our potential population density. This is how places like Port Ewen or Rondout came to be. The D&H Canal system, which brought Pennsylvania coal down to New York City is a perfect example of the Hudson Valley’s role in America’s great energy revolution, which not only transformed and improved our environment, but played a crucial role in abolishing slavery.
Coal was cleaner, denser and saved millions of trees from being cut down. Nuclear energy bears the same revolutionary quality in our time. It is magnitudes denser, cleaner and saves millions of trees which might otherwise be cut down to install thousands of acres of solar panels and dozens of battery plants. The solutions to our problems are not technological. We’ve had these answers for over half a century. Our problem is a question of politics. Decisionmakers in both the private and public sector will not be moved to action so long as we don’t demand it. A citizenry that doesn’t understand the technological reality or the historical context of our situation will be more like an animal who is a victim to their circumstance. The way out of our problem — in this case, the rising cost of energy — is to be a human.
Please tell us a bit about your upcoming documentary screening and discussion panel, and what you’re hoping to achieve by hosting the discussion.
The film we are screening is Part 3 in a series called Energy/Empire. The previous two films set the stage for this third act titled America’s Green Counter-Revolution. It’s a series that is meant to wake Americans up to their own history, which is intrinsically tied to world history. The first two films focus on Cuba and Sri Lanka, but part 3 is unabashedly American. The first shot that rang out during the American Revolution, was “the shot heard round the world” because it kicked off a world revolution of the sovereign nation state against the British Empire. That struggle continues today, and it’s imperative for Hudson Valley residents to recognize their role as historical actors in the ongoing drama of American Revolution and Empire-inspired Counter Revolution. The questions over our energy play a pivotal role in understanding that struggle which will be the theme of our panel discussion following the film screening.
You’ve clearly put a lot of work into producing these documentaries. What does the process look like behind the scenes in terms of research, organization, editing and putting it all together?
For the documentaries, I do all the researching, writing, editing, narrating, graphics, literally everything, myself. This particular series started as an essay I wrote in 2023 called Maintaining Empire via Food and Energy: Cuba & Sri Lanka. A major part of the project is sitting and listening to the material that is out there, in particular, other documentaries. I start to get a sense of the same story that is told from various angles to present people with a false view of history and reality. What I attempt to do is to use these propagandistic documentaries and edit them together in a way that reveals their true nature to the audience.
Please give us a broader sense of your work with NY Energy Alliance, Space Commune, Kingston Creative and any other projects I may have missed.
These are projects I founded at various stages which may seem like completely separate lanes, but ultimately work in concert to pursue the same goal: a more prosperous future for a shared community of one mankind. Kingston Creative is the vehicle for applying my design talents and creative thinking to help local businesses, which in turn improves the local economy.
Space Commune has become a vehicle to understand world politics, especially in the realm of energy. This is the main venue we (my partner Alex and I) have used to conduct conversations with experts (via our podcast), produce documentaries, and publish think pieces from an American perspective that is rooted in the same anti-imperialist sentiment that guided our Founding Fathers. Ultimately, we would love to see the United States join Russia and China in building the International Lunar Research Station, a nuclear-powered research facility on the moon (a literal space commune!). And we would love to see the United States join the Belt and Road Initiative (the United States had the same idea in the 1900s, it was called the Cosmopolitan Railway). This type of cooperative, win-win world development lays the foundation for durable world peace.
New York Energy Alliance is a statewide project created out of the necessity to reckon with the irrational path our state has been heading down, especially since 2019 when the CLCPA was passed — a statewide climate law which has sent us spiraling down a path of economic peril and uncertainty.
I have another project called American Thesis, which is still in its infancy. This is a nationally-oriented project with the goal of rekindling genuine American culture. Thomas Cole was the father of the first American school of art. His legacy has been captured by instructions who hate everything he actually stood for. They have retconned him as a ‘proto-environmentalist’ or a ‘romantic’ which couldn’t be further from the truth. Cole was a devout Christian in the platonic sense and a committed student of Friedrich Schiller. You can read more in my essay Thomas Cole’s Warning to the American People on americanthesis.com.
How can people find your work and get in touch? And any parting thoughts?
You can search any of these project names to find us on YouTube, Substack, etc. Websites are: kingstoncreative.net, spacecommune.com, nyenergyalliance.org, and americanthesis.com
I hope my work inspires others to do the same. Resist the urge to be a passive consumer — never stop utilizing the thing that makes you human, your creativity!
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