Catskills Energy Future III

Catskills Energy Future is a series of film screenings and community conversation about a consequential shift in New York City’s and New York State’s land use and energy policies. For over a century, hundreds of thousands of acres in the Catskills have been locked up as forever wild to protect the ideas of untouched nature and pure mountain water. These protections had the consequence of freezing development across an entire region. That era is on the verge of ending.

As water filtration becomes an eventual engineering reality and climate law deadlines approach, the logic for holding vast tracts of upstate land is changing. New York is no longer organizing its watershed around protecting water and nature, but as a potential platform for land-intensive renewable energy generation, battery storage, and future transmission.

This transition is not without precedent. From the earliest days of the watershed system, influential voices argued that the only way to protect city water was to restrict population, suppress industry, and limit human presence in the Catskills altogether. The cold logic of treating people and productive land use as a threat rather than a resource has shaped a century of policy. Today, it risks reappearing in a new form: land used not for local prosperity, but for land-intensive infrastructure serving distant needs.

This Saturday, March 21 event, starting at 2 PM, features the third screening of Unfiltered: New York’s Watershed Battle, followed by an audience Q&A examining what this transition means for land use, grid reliability, workers, and local communities and whether the region will once again be asked to absorb the physical costs of New York City’s growth without a meaningful voice in the outcome.

It will be at the Phoenicia Playhouse at 10 Church Street in Phoenicia, NY.