Catskills Energy Future is a film screening and conversation about a quiet but consequential shift in New York City’s infrastructure strategy. For decades, hundreds of thousands of acres in the Catskills were locked up to avoid building a filtration plant, freezing development across an entire region in the name of water protection. That era is on the verge of ending.

As filtration becomes an eventual engineering reality, the logic for holding vast tracts of upstate land is changing. New York City is no longer organizing its watershed around protecting water, but as a platform for renewable energy generation, battery storage, and future transmission, tying the Catskills directly to the city’s climate and power ambitions.

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 preserved not for local prosperity, but for land-intensive infrastructure serving distant needs.

The evening features the world premiere of Unfiltered: New York’s Watershed Battle, followed by a moderated discussion and 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.