I'm on another huge journey.
This time, I'm travelling the length of the Americas.
It's a journey down through two vast continents
that cover a quarter of the world's land surface.
It'll take me to places of myth and wonder.
Feels like stumbling upon a secret kingdom.
From the frozen beauty of the Arctic...
HE LAUGHS
..I'm travelling to some of the world's great cities...
This is completely breathtaking.
SHOUTING IN OWN LANGUAGE
..then on into the beautiful and blighted tropics...
We're with armed conservationists.
..to the heart of the battle to save the planet.
GUNSHOT
GUNSHOTS
On this part of my journey through the Americas,
I'm in the United States, travelling down the Rocky Mountains
from Montana to Colorado.
In a town with 11 different prisons,
I meet inmates getting ready for a life on the outside.
I'd like an orange cream soda, please.
I visit a huge rewilding project out on the vast prairies,
encountering some of America's ancient inhabitants...
By the time they reached us,
they would be at full ramming speed, wouldn't they?
..and I hear about a long and tortured history.
See, me, I'd push the white guy down and roll under the pick-up.
THEY LAUGH
I was in the far north of the United States,
taking one of the great American railway journeys
on the Amtrak Empire Builder train,
travelling through the most spectacular mountain range
on the continent - the Rockies.
It's stunning.
The Rockies stretch more than 3,000 miles,
from the frozen forests of Canada to the parched deserts of New Mexico.
They separate the Pacific Ocean in the west
from America's vast plains to the east.
We just went for a cup of tea and we've come out of the mountains
and we're now out onto the prairie.
We are now in Big Sky Country -
Montana.
The state of Montana is larger than Germany,
but with a population less than Birmingham,
and it's most definitely frontier country.
Man in cowboy hat.
Would you be Rich? I am. You must be Simon. I am.
Thank you so much indeed. How are ya? Rich Roth. Nice to meet you.
Lovely to meet you. Simon Reeve. Hello. Hello. Welcome to Montana.
I got a big truck, I got lots of room. Let's get that sucker in here.
Thank you. Let's head to the ranch. Thank you, Rich. Thank you.
This is one of the least populated parts of the US, isn't it?
There is more cows than people.
Rich runs the IX Ranch.
We're not talking some small farm - it's about 200 square miles.
My grandfather, he understood the land almost better than the cattle,
I think, because he said, "No matter what you do,
"you take care of the land first, the cattle are second.
"The cattle are the product of what you do on the land."
So, if you overgraze, if you don't sell down your cows
on a drought year, you will not be there the next year to do that.
The ranch has more than 4,000 cattle.
They're spread over a huge area and they can sometimes be elusive.
So there's heifers over there.
You see 'em up there grazing, the dark... Looks like bushes to me.
We've had a few of those, as we get older. We're like, "I swear..."
And we get up there, "It's a bush cow! Dang it."
This is a fairly classic western scene.
It was spring round-up time.
There's a gate just off that ridge.
We're going to drop into that stubble, make a right.
In an era of industrial farming,
they still use cowboys and horses here to minimise the impact
on the land and the cattle.
But Rich wasn't entirely confident about my riding skills.
ENGINE STARTS
What could go wrong?
Across the US, the agricultural industry
is switching to intensive livestock farming,
with thousands of vast sheds and feedlots often housing
tens of thousands of animals.
Here at the IX, the cattle are out under the big Montana sky.
600 cattle in just one part of the ranch needed to be found,
then rounded up and moved to fresh pasture.
Porcupine quill. So these are porcupine quills
that this poor heifer has got its face into.
Try to get them as close to the base as you can and pull hard.
Thataway.
Quite astonishingly sharp. They walk up, "What is this thing?"
And they whack 'em with their tail and that's how it happens.
So, OK, we're going to... Shane, are you ready in a second? Yep.
All better.
They've been ranching here on this land for more than a century.
But in the wilds of Montana, it's still a precarious business,
subject to the whims of the market in the extreme weather.
We're up against the clock. That's the one thing about Montana
that I don't think a lot of people realise, that we're only about
six months away from when it snows again.
It is tough to farm and ranch out here, isn't it?
You've got life and death parts of it,
you've got financial parts of it. You know, we can adapt.
I mean, look at... You were out with me today
and we were on motorised vehicles.
My grandfather is probably turning over in his grave.
He's actually buried right on that mountain, over there.
He's up there and he's watching. He's watching now.
And I probably assume that he's, like,
"Rich, I don't know about you." But we're making it work.
CATTLE MOO
This life can be tough for the cowboys but, of course,
it's much tougher for the cattle.
This isn't a sanitised version of cattle ranching,
this is... This is the real deal, the reality.
What's with the branding? So, the brand,
it's a law in our state and it's to identify your cattle,
so they're not rustled or stole. It's the law in Montana
that all cattle have to be branded? That is correct.
Is cattle rustling still an issue for you?
It is cos we're out in this big country.
You don't know who is around and people can do it.
It still happens today, believe it or not.
And he's out of here.
She's gone. Aw!
The cool thing about how we do this is we brand 'em
in the same pasture they go back into. Right.
So the calves go back to where they last were,
the mothers find them, they instinctually know that,
and by tomorrow it's all good.
So much of America's identity has been built around the rugged
independence of the cowboy,
but that entire way of life is now increasingly under threat.
Dozens of farms and ranches in the US are disappearing every week.
Some of Rich's neighbours have already sold up or been forced out.
What are the challenges? What are the issues you face?
You've got land like this that's worth more for recreation
than it is for farming or ranching,
so the elevated price of... What do you mean by that?
Well, like, so, example, if someone from out of state
or out of country were to come and look at this ranch, they might say,
Wow, look at the great scenery," or, "I want a giant house over there.
"Look at the wildlife out there."
And say, "I don't need cows, I just..."
And they have the money to do it. For me, seeing this vastness
and recognising, actually, there's relatively few people in Montana,
it's hard to imagine there is great competition for the land here.
But that's to misunderstand the situation, really, isn't it? Right.
It's a crowded planet... Right. ..apart from anything else. Right.
And you can see that, if you went on any, you know, property site,
you see what the value of the land is,
but then you try to make a cow pay for that,
what that value is, you can't do it.
American farmers are dealing with the worst agricultural downturn
since the 1980s.
Incomes have fallen dramatically,
yet horsepower, manpower and equipment don't come cheap.
A combine harvester for a wheat farmer can cost more than £300,000.
And Montana's ranchers are also getting old -
their average age is more than 60 -
and youngsters are less willing to follow in their footsteps.
The future of ranching on the prairies is uncertain.
It's part of a crisis in rural communities across the country.
It's completely idyllic here...
..but it is also almost ludicrously large.
The distances are endless, the space is...enormous
and it can be overwhelming for some people. This is one of the
remotest, least populated parts of the United States
and that can put a lot of pressure on people...
..particularly farmers, who are often struggling to survive out here.
Perhaps for too long men here have been told to cowboy up
and bottle their emotions.
Montana has the highest suicide rate in the United States,
nearly twice the national average.
Isolation and lack of mental health care are partly to blame,
but so is the stress of farming.
This area feels like it's facing a long decline,
in many ways. It doesn't sound like a very happy future
for the American prairie,
but one guy thinks he's got a better solution.
All right.
Tarmac turns to dirt.
And it all gets a bit more remote.
I travelled across Montana to meet a man who sees the prairie not as
farmland but in a completely different light.
Someone with a spectacular vision for the future
and ambition as vast as the Montana sky.
We're here.
Sean? You made it.
We made it. Simon Reeve. Good to see you. Sean Garrity.
Look at that view!
Absolutely stunning.
There's four places in the world like this, of this scale,
and we're standing in one of them. Four places in the world. Yeah.
The Kazakh Steppe, the Patagonia Steppe, the Mongolian Steppe
and the northern Great Plains in North America.
It fits alongside those epic areas of wilderness.
Absolutely.
This is the American Prairie Reserve.
It's one of the biggest and most ambitious
rewilding projects on Earth.
Sean Garrity, the former Silicon Valley businessman behind it,
has been raising millions of dollars to buy up land here
and turn it back to the wild.
The American Prairie Reserve, or APR,
could one day cover three and a half million acres -
that's the size of much of southwest England.
Are we inside the APR now? We are in it.
We are absolutely in it.
This is what it looks like and this is native prairie. As you can see,
as you look out over this landscape,
there is not much to tell you what era you're in.
Is this the era of the Vikings?
Yes. This is what it looked like during the Viking times.
How about, you know, the Egyptians? Yeah.
During that time, when they were just discovering metal alloys
and things, this is what this looked like.
What you've identified here is a bit of a jewel...
Yeah. ..that is ripe for protection.
All the pieces are still intact and that's extremely rare.
If this landscape is destroyed through ploughing up
to grow a monoculture crop, that sort of thing,
putting this back together...
That sagebrush right there is 70 to 80 years old
and they're very difficult to get going again.
It's really complex, not unlike a rainforest,
and so to have this as the jewel, is to have the habitat to deal with,
and there's not much left in the world.
I don't want us to stop, let's carry on. I want to see more.
It's just brilliant. Look at it!
Prairies, savannahs, steppes - they're all grasslands
and one of our richest ecosystems,
but they're often grazed or ploughed.
Less than 10% of the world's grasslands are protected.
Instead of cattle grazing,
Sean wants to rewild the land and return it to its natural state.
They left them for us. This is too good to be true.
It's just wonderful. It's the Missouri River.
Come on, let's get out on it. All right.
As so often on the journeys I've been on, I've found examples...
..where people are doing something wonderful and worthy to try
and restore or save a landscape or an ecosystem,
but usually they're really small-scale.
This is not.
This is a country-sized attempt
to rewild a huge area of land.
And for it to be here, in the United States,
I'm completely stunned.
Rewilding is all about rebuilding natural ecosystems
and reintroducing key species.
It's about restoring and protecting wild landscapes.
Sean wants to reverse the huge decline in America's wildlife,
ultimately helping apex predators like bears, mountain lions
and wolves, and more humble citizens of the prairie.
Sean, how much has been lost in the United States?
In species, we don't think as much in terms of numbers of animals
but we think in terms of the animal's range.
So prairie dogs, they're down to less than 1%
of their original range in the lower 48 states.
They've been trapped, shot and poisoned
from their original millions upon millions of acres
down to very small spots here and there.
Prairie dogs are actually little burrowing rodents.
HE GASPS
SQUEAKING
Hear that?
That's an alarm call
and they're saying, "Get to your hole." So all the ones that weren't
by their holes are running to their holes.
And then the ones that look like white posts,
they've arrived at their holes, they've turned around,
they're starting to look at us to assess the threat.
What is the level of threat?
Where do they fit into the ecosystem?
Prairie dogs, when they wake up in the morning, their entire day
is trying to figure out how to not be eaten.
That's their job in life.
So we think of them like plankton in the ocean.
If you have a lot of prairie dogs, you have a lot of badgers, coyotes,
bullsnakes, rattlesnakes, black-footed ferrets,
ferruginous hawks, red-tailed hawks.
All different kinds of predators from the sky. To be really crude,
sometimes we calm them the Chicken McNuggets of the prairie.
Vast underground towns used to exist,
teeming with millions of prairie dogs.
Notice there's some bird excrement,
so a raptor's come and that usually means bad news for the prairie dog,
that the Raptor caught it and will sit here and eat it.
See the bones?
So, the bird's sitting here, spitting bones away.
That's just heartless.
And the entire head,
more teeth...
Poor little prairie dog.
These little rodents also have human predators.
Ranchers don't like them. They've gassed, shot and burnt them out,
removing a vital part of the food chain.
They compete for grass with livestock.
Some people say, "Well, don't... They're dangerous for horses.
"A horse might step in the hole."
But, actually, horses don't step in prairie dog holes.
In the US... I can't speak for...
I've been to a lot of other countries, but here
people tend to lean in a capitalist society
that land ought to be for making money, whether it's timber, mining,
cattle ranching, whatever it might be.
We should save some of it for nature and it's going away quickly.
It's really time to...
It's really time to grab some and make sure it's preserved
for hundreds and hundreds of years, before it's all gone.
Sean's project is buying up private tracts of land
to join up disconnected areas of public land
and make one huge area of wilderness.
The American Prairie Reserve is now already so vast
and much of it is so remote that the only way to get a real sense
of its size and the wildlife it hosts is to take to the air.
Those are mule deer.
Rewilding isn't just about saving wildlife -
it helps the planet.
Conservationists believe rewilding is a key strategy
for tackling climate change.
Left to its own devices, the vast prairie can absorb huge amounts
of carbon dioxide.
There's a golden eagle!
A... A golden eagle!
Buffalo!
The buffalo is also known as the North American bison.
They are completely magnificent.
They are enormous and powerful and majestic.
The buffalo was annihilated by settlers here in the 19th century.
There are plans to reintroduce 10,000 of them to the APR.
They'll be a major draw for the tourists Sean is hoping to attract
to camp, glamp and explore.
This is an amazing, resilient landscape.
You could have a thousand bison come thundering through here
and all these plants can take it.
The buffalo are key to creating a rich and sustainable ecosystem.
If we come back here in ten years, 20 years,
what's your vision of what we might see?
I think you'll see bison along the river, bighorn sheep,
maybe a grizzly bear walking along with three cubs,
maybe a pack of wolves moving along, seeing if they might be able to
chase some elk for dinner themselves. The habitat's here.
It's just a matter of time to coax that wildlife back.
I am sold. It sounds... It sounds wonderful.
The American Prairie Reserve isn't without its critics.
Some ranchers here resent outsiders buying up the land and threatening
the frontier way of life.
However, I thought it was wonderful
and important and desperately needed.
Rewilding could give us the chance to feel closer to nature,
to wildlife that has teeth and claws and fangs,
and to feel awe and wonder.
Many of the reserve's neighbours are delighted with Sean's plans.
I continued my journey across what sometimes felt like
an ocean of grassland.
Look! Look at the sign here.
So that means we are now entering
Fort Belknap Native American Reservation.
By the end of the 1800s,
nearly all of the surviving Native American tribes
had been forced into reservations
by the relatively new United States government.
Many of the reservations still exist.
One of the community leaders here in the Fort Belknap Reservation
is George Horse Capture.
He has strong views on what's happened to his people.
What is a reservation? Let's say a prison.
A holding facility.
There's always some confining element to keep people separate
and keep them in their...
I think the term most commonly used is in their social class.
Don't let 'em rise out of it.
Don't mingle with us too much - white America.
But this is home.
This little reservation...
..that's all we got left,
after being nomads, wandering wherever we wanted to.
Like many reservations,
Fort Belknap has been blighted by social problems.
I'll do the gate.
Unemployment and drug dependency
are higher than other parts of Montana,
while life expectancy for males is 20 years lower.
But George sees a new hope for his community
in the shape of an iconic creature
that can grow to be over two metres tall and weigh more than a tonne.
Look at that sight.
Does it still give you a bit of a thrill, George?
Oh, yeah. They kinda remind me of my grandfathers.
Get up, stand, look around.
"What are these white guys doing here?"
HE LAUGHS
Buffalo have been almost entirely absent
from these prairies for decades.
Now this herd of purebred buffalo have been brought to Fort Belknap
in partnership with the American Prairie Reserve.
GRUNTING
We always shared our life together -
Indians and Buffalo -
through the good times and the bad times.
The European invaders, as they came here, is almost like locusts
going into a grain field.
They're going to strip it for all it's worth and move on.
In just four decades, towards the end of the 19th century,
an estimated population of 30 million buffalo were annihilated,
down to just 500.
For Native Americans who depended on them, it was a catastrophe.
There's still a lot of people that... "You're conquered.
"The buffalo are gone."
And, "Get over it."
And you can't get over...a genocide.
Be it the buffalos' genocide,
my people's genocide,
you just can't get over that.
You can't hate and be angry about it, but it's important...
..that that kind of knowledge survives.
The white settlers slaughtered so many millions of buffalo
to starve the Native Americans of their main source of food
and clothing, force them into reservations
and destroy their spirit.
Do you feel, at a practical level,
it will change things and improve things for the community?
We suffered dearly and then I look at them and I think, you know,
these are relative, they suffered dearly, too,
but we're going to make it together.
We're going to make it to what we call
when things are set right again.
And that's... That's pretty... That's pretty good.
Buffalo had been returned to this and other reservations
for ceremonial, food and conservation purposes.
I mean, you look at these two.
Are these both bulls out here?
They're watching us carefully.
By the time they reached us,
they would be at full ramming speed, wouldn't they?
They'd cover that in a couple blinks of an eye.
They'd probably be three quarters of the way here
before we figured - some of us figured - out what to do.
See, me, I'd push the white guy down and roll under the pick-up.
THEY LAUGH
There are buffalo once more on the American plain
and that's a bloody wonderful thing.
It feels like righting a historical wrong
and should help to bring back pride,
purpose and even jobs to the community.
I headed south, back towards the Rockies,
the mountains that form the western spine of the continent.
We're just coming into Utah,
into a very beautiful - and quite green - Rocky Mountains,
at least at this point.
Utah was founded by people who consider themselves exiles
from the rest of the United States, the Mormons.
Mormons is a term often used for members of
the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Mormons were some of the first Europeans
to cross the Rocky Mountains. They were one of the principle forces
in the settlement of the West.
INDISTINCT CHATTER
I met up with Grace and Emma, Mormon sisters,
for a hike along what's called the Mormon Trail,
to find out a bit more about this conservative, controversial,
and very American church.
The basics of the Book of Mormon are that this Jewish family
actually fled from Jerusalem,
over the oceans, to America, the Americas,
and there that family ended up splitting into two tribes,
the Nephites and the Lamanites.
And this is a long time ago?
Long, long time ago, yeah.
Way before Europeans, before Christ.
Yeah. Before Europeans came here, OK. Mm-hm.
Where did Native Americans come into this?
One of the origins of Native Americans is actually those tribes.
The best part about the Book of Mormon is when Christ,
after his resurrection, actually comes to the Americas.
Jesus, after he died and was resurrected, you believe,
came to the United States? Mm-hm, yeah. OK.
Mormons certainly have some eccentric beliefs -
in this country, they're not alone in that.
The Mormons first prophet was Joseph Smith.
In 1830, he published The Book of Mormon, after an angel guided him
to mysterious golden tablets.
The Mormon faith grew quickly, then Mormons headed west.
There's a lot of persecution against a lot of people in the faith.
People didn't really like... They're, like, "Mormons, argh!"
That was partly because, at the time,
Mormons were practising polygamy, wasn't it?
So it wasn't a persecution, it was prosecution.
Yep. And the idea that Joseph Smith
had a vision and had an angel come to him, people didn't really like,
they thought that was really weird, right?
So they ended up coming on this huge, long trek down here to Utah.
This is just one of the ways they got, eventually,
to the Salt Lake Valley.
But they had to get over these. Look at this!
This is the sort of landscape they had to come through.
Yeah. A lot of people died.
Some people had babies on the trail, who they had to bury along the way.
This story, it must give you a real sense of roots in this land,
of struggle and loss and blood that was shed.
You feel a belonging. Mm-hm. Even just, like, to the mountains
cos you're, like, "Hey, this is where..."
Like, they came over these mountains and so coming up here, you're, like,
"This is what they saw." Yeah.
It gives you identity, as much as anything.
There are now 16 million members of the Mormon Church
around the world and it's one of the fastest growing faiths.
Its success owes much to tens of thousands of missionaries like Emma,
who spread the word and recruit new followers.
You go to someone, you're, like, "Hey, I like your shoes."
And then... Oh, that's quite...
Well, that's an instant in, isn't it? Yeah.
You can always find something to compliment. What's your aim?
Are you aiming to...? Is the ultimate aim to baptise people?
It is to invite others to come under Christ by helping them receive
the restored gospel through a faith in Jesus Christ and His atonement,
repentance, baptism, receiving the gift of the Holy Ghost
and enduring to the end. That's quite a long mission statement,
if you don't mind me pointing out.
Christianity has long been an incredible social and political
force in the US, but, in recent years,
the number of people who say they're Christians has declined.
Young people in particular are turning away from powerful
evangelical churches and preachers.
But the Mormon Church hasn't suffered the same way,
probably because it's got good souls like Emma and Grace out there doing
charity work and spreading the message.
Back on the road, driving for hours
across what sometimes felt like endless open space.
But it was worth it.
The rocks really tower here.
It's easy to forget how massive the United States is
and that enormous space
obviously encompasses so many different environments
and ecosystems and sheer bloody beauty.
I took a small detour on my journey south and stopped off
at the Arches National Park. With its sandstone rock formations,
it's one of America's most iconic landscapes
and a huge tourist attraction.
I mean, come on.
That is flipping amazing, isn't it?
If you want to come and enjoy peace and raw nature here,
I think you might be a little bit too late.
Several decades too late.
It is still stunning. It is still a gorgeous experience.
You can still get lost in the moment.
You don't have to be inside an American national park to find
incredible beauty here.
Yay!
It's the Colorado River.
Even in remote and lovely corners of this country,
there are people living out here
in thousands and thousands of small communities.
I was heading into the land of small-town America,
traditionally the heart and soul of the USA.
Here we go. So this is the little town of Nucla.
Roughly 700 people live in Nucla, in Colorado.
Like many of America's small towns, it's fallen on hard times.
This was once the centre of a thriving mining industry,
but then companies and the government realised
they could buy cheaper from abroad.
Over the years, the mines have shut down. The last local mine
will soon close - along with another 80 jobs.
It's so quiet here.
The stores and the buildings have closed...
..because so many of the jobs have gone.
I wanted to know if the American dream was still alive in Nucla,
so I popped into one of the shops.
When I started, there were four pharmacies
and about ten years ago there was me left. That was it.
We've done everything we can and yet all of a sudden we just feel like
everything's been yanked out below us.
Even though we've done the right thing - we've worked hard,
we put money into our property,
we've saved money, we've provide our own health care
and then all of a sudden everything's gone.
I mean, without any warning.
It sounds to me like people feel they've been betrayed,
people feel angry.
Well, people are angry because, you know, somebody that owns
a company makes a decision that,
"We can save two cents by doing it someplace else, so goodbye.
"You know, you're gone."
I do you think this sense that a lot of people have here
that the old industries are closing down and that there is
a feeling that the system is rigged in favour of the large corporations,
the wealthy and the elite,
and many areas of the country are being forgotten and left behind,
this is a big part of the widening
and the sharpening political divide in the US.
But not all of the small towns in Colorado
are in a terminal state of decline.
It looks like a fairly prosperous little community.
Here we are.
Garden City Town Hall.
We're here...to meet the cops.
I was going to get a tour of his turf with Officer Bacon.
This road, right here, this is 6th Avenue Lane.
A regular neighbourhood. Regular neighbourhood.
In Garden City. Mm-hm. Colorado. Mm-hm.
How many people? There's 256, roughly.
How many streets?
Oh, let's see. We've got 25th Street,
26th Street, 27th Street.
27th Street Road. Are you going to get off one hand?
We have five streets going north and south.
It must be one of the smaller...
We're about a half a square mile, that's how big our town is.
Look at the left, you've got plants, bushes, well-kept lawns
and general smartness.
All these railings, the benches,
that's all new. New pavement.
I mean, this whole road... New pavement and new paint. Yep.
So this this whole road, right here,
this road was completed, I'd say, about six months ago.
All brand-new. Oh, right.
Garden City is tiny, but it has a well-equipped police force -
with four full-time officers.
The local council has clearly been on a big spending spree.
Where is this money coming from? We have our secrets.
HE LAUGHS
Tell us the truth! I can't tell you everything.
So, we actually, we do have, in this small little community,
we actually have four marijuana dispensaries.
Four marijuana dispensaries.
And that sets us apart from every other town in this county.
We get people coming in from all over the place,
coming here specifically,
just to purchase their marijuana,
whether it be for recreational use or medicinal use.
And, as an officer of the law, how are you feeling about that?
I'm OK with it. Honestly, I've never come across anybody
who uses marijuana who is...angry.
They're all nice.
That's a hell of a thing to say.
Yeah. They're all happy. You've never come across anyone?
All they want is cookies, some snacks, maybe a soda.
Munchies. Munchies. They want munchies. They want to sit down,
they want to watch some cartoons and just enjoy their munchies.
We can go in there. OK.
So this is a marijuana dispensary? It's basically a cannabis shop?
It is. Kind of like, you know, you go to a place to go buy groceries.
Yeah. You come here to buy your marijuana. Marijuana store.
In 2012, Colorado voted to be one of the first states
to legalise recreational cannabis.
Welcome to Smokey's. We are a dispensary, is what we are here,
which means that we sell cannabis-related products.
Excuse me, sir.
Thank you for shopping at Smokey's Have a great day. I'll see you guys.
I met Scott Brady. Smokey's has quite a lot of business going here.
It's a bit of an overwhelming amount of choice.
It is. What the hell is that?
So that's going to be for dabbing, so it's much like vaping.
You've heard vaping, right? I have heard of vaping.
You can even vape this product -
that's another form that you can do with the product.
Under federal law, which is made by the US government in Washington,
all of this is actually still illegal.
However, more than half of US states
have now legalised cannabis to some degree.
But not everyone is so positive.
Cannabis is a drug and, of course,
there are health risks with all drugs.
"Cinderella 99. Cherry Lime Haze. Black Russian."
I mean, it's like looking at a long list of cocktails, isn't it?
It is, it is. This gives you a sample of each one of the available
strains that we have on the floor right now
and there's a variety of them. Each one of these smell different.
This one right here,
this is the Cinderella 99 that you saw on the sign.
That smells very sweet. Right? Very sweet.
And you're going to have some that are towards the fruity side.
America can be a weird place. At this very local level,
the Garden City community has been able to pass legislation
to allow cannabis shops in their neighbourhood.
Other towns said no.
Garden City had its eye on the tax.
Thanks to a 3% tax levied on cannabis sales,
the town's annual revenues have soared to more than $2 million.
All right, so we've got some suits over here for you.
We're going to have you guys suit up.
So I spray you down before we head back.
All right, go ahead and spin around for me, please.
That's great. Thank you.
So we'll go into one of our flower rooms.
These plants are all in week seven.
We do a nine-week gestation,
that is to say that these plants will be done
in nine weeks, from beginning to end.
Research suggests excessive use of cannabis can increase the risk
of developing a psychotic illness.
Cannabis is still illegal in most countries around the world,
including in the UK,
but there are now growing calls for the drug to be legalised.
Who knows? We might soon see dispensaries like this
on British high streets.
In Colorado, many think they've led the way.
So, these plants are all harvested up.
Is this the future of cannabis in the United States?
I would like to hope so, yeah.
I think that what we're doing and the way we're doing it,
I really think, is the future for cannabis
and not just in the United States.
We fully understand that it's not just the eyes of Colorado
that are on us. It's the eyes of the world.
The genie's out of the bottle, if you will.
The final part of this journey took me away from small-town America,
into the most populated part of the Rockies.
This part of the Rockies area is sprawling connected cities.
I drove to Denver, nicknamed the Mile High City.
It's one of the fastest growing cities in America.
It's yet another tech hub for newly arrived internet startups
doing goodness knows what,
but I wanted to meet a local who'd grown up here and could give me
another perspective on life in this part of the Rockies.
I think this is where we're meeting him.
On the outskirts of Denver, I met up with campaigner
and community activist Juston Cooper.
Thanks for meeting me here. I appreciate it. Thank you.
Thank you for meeting us.
He took me back to where he grew up.
It's considered urban.
It's considered urban. It looks pretty suburban to me. Right?!
How is this...? Yeah, that was always, like...
You know, because all the things that come with a community
that is technically low to middle income.
This was a fairly safe and secure place to grow up for you, was it?
No. Not safe and secure... It was... It was... It was home.
This is, you know, this place developed.
We were just around the corner from Juston's family home
and it was a very special day of the year.
What's happening now? What's happening, y'all?
OG, what's going on with you?
Juston has basically invited us round to his mum's house
to have lunch. It's Mother's Day and he says,
"No, no, it's not a problem. She'll love to see you."
I've got some chocolates that we bought in a store.
I still feel a little bit guilty about it, but...
I'm not entirely dressed, either. I hope we'll be all right.
Hey. How are you guys doing?
We're doing so well. Honour to meet you. Nice to meet you.
Thank you so much for letting us come to visit...
Oh, you're so welcome. ..on Mother's Day.
You are so welcome.
We brought you some chocolates. Thank you so much.
Do you eat chocolate? Oh, yes, absolutely. OK.
Teamwork makes the dream work.
I'm pretty shameless, so I wasn't going to turn down a family lunch,
but Juston's a passionate campaigner.
He's a leading advocate for reforming
the American prison system.
We'd only managed a few mouthfuls before talk turned to the issue
close to his heart.
So, just so we understand,
I mean, basically, America jails an unbelievable number of people.
2.3 million we incarcerate.
You know, predominantly black and brown people.
Where does it all start?
It doesn't have to necessarily be a criminal act, right?
Traffic is a really good example of that.
Traffic is not criminalised per se until a certain point,
so you can get stopped for a busted tail light, you can get stopped
in this country for having a cracked window, windshield,
and you can get stopped for all these reasons
and these penalties and fines start to add up.
If you don't have the ability to pay, in this country,
courts can issue what is called a warrant.
Now you're in violation of the court by not paying these fines or fees.
It then can cross over to criminal,
so you can be held in contempt of court
for not paying your fines or fees.
You have a warrant that you have to pay a fee on
once you're detained and that begins arrest, right?
Now, all from a busted tail light or all from a defective vehicle.
I got stopped for... I had a tail light out.
One bulb wasn't working? One bulb wasn't working.
And they stopped me for that and they took me to jail.
I spent the night in jail.
The system in the United States has done more damage
and created more harm to communities,
particularly communities of colour, than imaginable.
And what you're hearing is that's how it snowballs.
That's the chain reaction.
And it's this pipeline that basically says you're noncompliant,
you're poor, you don't have money, and now here you are.
You start to snowball into the system and that's how the pipeline
gets created. Into the criminal justice...
Into the criminal justice system, and it can lead to prison.
Many local councils across the US are hugely dependent
on these kind of fines for revenue.
It's alleged they can have an incentive to persecute people
for trivial offences and bank the money from the harsh fines.
You have a very lovely family. Thank you. OK? Thank you so much.
Studies show black minority and poor communities here
are disproportionately targeted by courts and the police.
When you go to get into your truck, do you...?
Do you find yourself looking around, just to check it every time,
in case you're going to have something wrong
with it and the police are going to stop you? Oh, absolutely.
What is the lowest level of problem you can have on a vehicle
that you've heard about that's resulted in people being
sucked, almost, into the criminal justice system?
Something hanging from your rear-view mirror,
like an air freshener, charm, a bracelet or any of that kind
of stuff that's hanging.
That little thing alone can give them a reason to stop,
which then can lead to fines.
This country prides itself on being the land of the free,
but the US has some local laws which can often seem completely bonkers.
In certain parts of the country, you know, where you live matters.
You can have mismatched curtains in your house, in your windows,
and get fined by the city for that.
Mismatched curtains? Yes.
Homelessness is another major pipeline to prison in the US.
Thousands of people are jailed here
after being fined for being homeless,
just for sleeping in a park,
for loitering, standing around in public.
This can be a brutal country.
Our prisons and jails are filled with poor people...
..because if you have the means and the resources
to get yourself legal representation,
that's going to prevent you from going to jail.
Does it sometimes feel to you like the system here
is almost criminalising poverty?
Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely.
Juston took me south to another small Colorado town
which prospers from a single industry.
That's quite a view. That is.
What makes Canon City special?
This area where we're standing,
right over there has the most prisons in one area in the country
and probably in the world.
Canon City is a prison town.
Out there, an astonishing 11 prisons and 9,000 inmates.
These particular prisons drive jobs.
They're the revenue earner,
they generate and pump money back into the county, right?
The number one employer in this town is its prisons.
You have an industry that's being created.
Like any industry, it grows.
So, in the United States,
from the '80s until now, you had this huge boom
of prison development across the nation.
And now here we are, trillions of dollars spent,
yet no-one feels safer.
Despite all the jails,
Americans remain some of the most fearful people in the world.
Juston wants to reform the system.
Our part of the journey together has to end now, doesn't it?
Because tomorrow I'm doing something that you can't come with me on.
I'm going into a prison. Yeah.
Probably best you don't come. Probably.
Prison reformers... Yeah! ..generally aren't invited in.
Thank you for the opportunity in elevating the conversation, my friend.
America spends $80 billion a year locking up its own citizens.
A quarter of the prisoners on planet Earth
are believed to be here, in the United States.
Well, that truly is a concrete monstrosity.
The huge scale of the American penal system can be seen in Canon City.
There are federal, state, county and female correctional facilities.
But, to their credit, they're pretty open to foreign TV travellers.
My first stop was Colorado's oldest prison.
This is a medium security correctional facility,
holding 900 inmates.
Mindy has the key.
It's much bigger than it looks from the outside. Yeah.
Prisoners here are put to work making car number plates
for the state government.
Every licence plate in the state of Colorado is manufactured here
and has been since the 1920s.
This wasn't entirely what I'd expected to see inside a US prison.
It's like a factory,
but a factory with some really tough cons working there.
How many in a set?
Has Colorado got that many cars?
The pay here is tiny, just a few dollars a day.
But, for many, it's better than sitting in a cell.
That is quite... It's quite mesmerising to watch this, actually.
You are like the ultimate multitasker, aren't you?
Why would you say America jails so many people?
In what sense?
That's an exaggeration,
but prison labour is a a billion dollar industry in the US.
Prisons in the United States
employ nearly half a million correctional officers.
Half a million -
that's more than five times the size of the British Army.
The US jails more than seven times the number of people per capita
compared to the average in Europe
and sentences in the US can be much longer.
Across town, I visited a maximum security prison,
where many of the offenders face a lifetime behind bars.
OK. Left my phone.
Left all my stuff.
It's a little bit scary, quite honestly.
160,000 prisoners in the US are serving life sentences.
And for many, life means life, with no chance of release.
This is something you do all the time, but for me that's a big deal.
This is where the tension rises a little.
It does a little bit. Not for you, though. No.
After 21 years. This is just a typical day.
Right. Thank you.
The men I was about to meet had all been convicted
when they were juveniles, some as young as 16.
Good Afternoon. Afternoon. Afternoon.
Were all of you convicted 18 or under? Under 18, in fact?
I believe I was sentenced around my birthday of turning 16.
I was 16 when I committed my offence. I have 40 to life now.
I used to have two lifes plus 51 years.
Two life sentences plus 51 years?
Yes. I had 17 charges,
from murder to burglary to auto theft to attempted murder
to possession of dangerous weapons, etc. I had a lot of charges.
So, when you started in the prison system, you must have thought,
"I am never leaving this prison alive." Yes.
Many of these men committed terrible crimes when they were young
and face the rest of their lives in prison,
but a recent Supreme Court ruling means they might now get out.
Currently, right now, we are learning about mobile platforms.
The mobile platforms consist of Facebook, everything that's going on
in the 21st century that they have missed out
because of the incarceration period, OK?
And then, when we are actually ready to go, we actually put them
on the virtual reality simulation.
Before any of these prisoners are eligible for parole,
they must complete a three-year re-entry programme.
It's an innovative project, where they use virtual reality
to simulate life situations in the outside world.
On this simulation, it's basically how do you order a full service
at a current restaurant?
And then have a seat.
So, are we seeing what Mr Romero is seeing? We are.
If you look up, do you see the waiter, Romero? Yes, I do.
OK. We're going to go ahead and start.
How are you this evening? I'm very well, thank you.
Would you like something to start,
before I take the rest of your order?
I'd like am orange cream soda, please.
OK.
Tip is not included. It's up to you if you'd like to leave a tip.
The whole minefield of tipping in an American restaurant!
I've never seen or heard about anything like this.
Is it useful? Absolutely.
I haven't seen the inside of a restaurant in so long.
We've got one where we go into a supermarket
and there are so many choices - it's kind of overwhelming.
So having a chance to see myself in a different setting
outside these prison walls is an amazing feeling
and it reminds me of how close I am
and what I've been working for this whole time.
What are your strengths?
I think my strengths are patience, the ability to work with others.
Were you in prison?
Yes.
Can you explain more?
As a kid, I made poor choices and so ended in prison.
OK. That's great. Thank you.
For too long, not enough has been done in the American prison system
to prepare people for a life on the outside,
to give them a chance.
Now, finally, at least here, they are going through a programme
that will help to prepare them for the day, eventually,
when it's possible, for some of them,
they'll step out through a gate.
I travelled from the prairies of Montana,
right down through the Rockies.
I'd seen hope in the American Prairie Reserve
and frustration at the American penal system.
I'd seen the beauty of the American West,
what was once the frontier
of a country obsessed with freedom and opportunity,
and I'd learnt how many here feel
they've too often been forgotten and left behind.
That's the end of this part of my journey.
It's been completely eye-opening for me.
I've seen a completely new side of the Wild West.
Next time,
I'm travelling down through the beautiful state of California...
Now that is a view worth protecting, eh?
..under threat from drought and fire.
The speed at which the flames can move is astonishing.