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 more than 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,
I'm travelling to some of the world's great cities...
Oh, this is completely breathtaking.
SOLDIERS SHOUT IN THEIR 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
On this leg of my journey,
I'm travelling the length of California,
the countryside state on America's beautiful West Coast.
It's a place of huge distances
and enormous contrasts...
Now, that is a view worth protecting, eh?
..under threat from drought and fire...
The speed at which the flames can move is astonishing!
..where thousands have been left behind or opted out...
This is like the Wild West.
..in one of the richest places on Earth.
You can come here with next to nothing and make it big.
Live that dream!
next to the Pacific in Northern California,
where the mist rolls in and giants grow.
This is the land of the redwoods,
some of the tallest, oldest trees on the planet.
Flipping heck.
My brain can't quite comprehend it, actually.
It's like being a child again.
The scale of them just doesn't compute.
Now do you get a sense of the scale of it? The size?
That is not just a tree,
that is a whole world of life just there!
Hundreds of tonnes of living, woody flesh.
2,000-3,000 years old.
The very biggest redwood are called titans.
They've been described as the blue whales of the plant world.
Early European settlers started chopping them down.
Since then, it's thought 95% of the old growth forest in the US
has been lost.
Much of what remains is protected in national parks.
But, even today, these trees are threatened.
Incredibly, redwoods are being attacked
by poachers armed with chainsaws.
Look at this!
It's a crime scene!
It's a two-metre chunk of the tree, but not just a chunk.
It's the critical part of the tree that contains its genetic code
and its best chance of regenerating.
You can see just here.
That's what the poachers are after.
These knobbly growths are highly prized
as valuable bowls and ornaments.
Hundreds of redwoods have been critically damaged by poaching.
I could see why some say this is a crime akin to hacking tusks
off an elephant.
I headed to meet a group of adventurers and conservationists
who are determined to protect and replant
California's incredible redwoods.
Look up!
To see their work meant getting high up into the canopy of the forest.
I get really bad vertigo.
But this is an experience you just have to...
You've got to bottle and swallow your fear.
You know, they say it's not the fall that hurts.
It's the sudden impact. OK.
Unless, of course, you didn't live through the fall.
Yeah, let's stop there, stop there.
I would be much more comfortable on the front line right now.
I swear to you.
Urgh...
Farewell!
It's faced greater threats than me,
but presumably I want to try and keep my feet off it?
If you can, try not to drag.
God, this is completely extraordinary.
A few branches in the way.
Agh!
I've got to try and relax!
OK, I can't see the ground.
That feels better.
Don't worry about how far up you are.
Or how far down! Oh, God!
OK...
Look! We're up in the canopy!
What the hell are you doing, Jake?!
We ascended into the canopy of an older redwood here.
How high up are we?
We're probably around 250 feet in the air.
Relax, relax, relax...
What we're looking for here is some of the new growth from this year
or this past season where it's actually hardened off a little bit.
We call them sun needles.
Jake Milarch is from the Archangel Ancient Tree Archive.
He takes cuttings from the tops of the genetically strongest trees,
and then he propagates thousands of new redwoods.
We literally strip a few needles here.
We can dip it in a simple rooting hormone.
In a matter of six months in a mist tent,
we've got another rooted tree. In a mist tent? Yeah. So, it's just...
So, you're really trying to recreate...? Environment mimicry.
Yeah. Some of the cool stuff that's going on out here,
we try to mimic in our laboratory.
In a matter of months, you could have a clone
or duplicate of the world's tallest tree
or the world's biggest tree.
Are you a big tree guy?
I would like to think I'm a big tree guy.
Trees, you know, just almost have a certain energy about them.
Trees can off gas or aerosol, certain hormones and certain things
that kind of give you the euphoric feeling.
Are we getting a natural high?
I think we are right now and it feels really good. Mm!
The ultimate aim of this project
is even greater than saving the redwoods.
Well, I tell you what, coming down is worse than going up!
The team at Archangel want to grow the biggest trees on Earth
in order to tackle climate change.
I just want to give it a hug. Yeah! There you go!
Archangel was founded by Jake's father, David Milarch.
He's discovered stumps of chopped down titans.
Some are still alive.
They're being regrown.
And here we are!
This is stunning!
We're in somebody's back garden here!
Look at the size of this!
Have you ever been inside a 3,000-year-old living tree?
No.
The measurements are 35 foot in diameter.
This tree was 1,000 years old when Jesus walked the Earth.
Let's put it that.
They are the solution to the future for human beings.
Why are redwoods so magnificent at helping combat climate change?
Well, you know, the hot fudge sundaes for these guys is CO2
and they exhale out pure oxygen.
A tree this size could store four to 500 tonnes,
dry weight, of excess carbon.
Each tree.
Redwoods grow ten feet a year normally.
Most trees grow a foot a year.
So, by growing ten feet a year,
they bring in...they whisk out ten times
the amount of CO2 out of our atmosphere
that most normal trees do.
And, with the latest science, we've discovered
the older they get, the faster they grow.
This tree hits puberty at 600.
There's scientists just signed a paper, said, "We have 12 years
"to reverse this thing." Climate change. Yes.
In 12 years, we could make a couple of billions
of these with micropropagation.
We know we need to do this now.
But are people banging on your door now saying, "Can we work with you?"
Are governments coming to you?
No government support from any government on the planet.
Zero.
There's a lot more money in cutting them down and selling them.
And, after they do that, then they tell us,
"Well, there's no money left to plant them."
All right.
It's lunchtime.
David, it makes me mad.
I hear you.
Reforestation won't change things overnight,
because trees take time to grow.
And we'd need to reduce burning fossil fuels.
But some scientists now argue planting hundreds of billions
of trees is the biggest and cheapest way of tackling our climate crisis.
You hear now people's solutions to climate change being schemes
that sound bonkers sometimes,
spraying chemicals into the upper atmosphere,
putting mirrors into space to reflect sunlight,
building skyscraper filters that will suck out carbon
from the air, but giant trees?
They are a natural climate solution.
There may not be much old growth ancient forests left,
but the north of California is still a picturesque landscape
where small-town America nestles among the trees.
People living the American Dream.
It's a white picket fence!
But living in the woods can carry huge risks.
Look at this!
There's crime scene tape up here.
My God.
My journey through California was taking me to what's left
of the small-town of Paradise.
In 2018, this was the scene of one of the deadliest
wildfires in US history.
It's as if this place has been hit by conflict.
The Paradise Fire took more than 80 lives.
It destroyed at least 13,000 homes.
This place was really very pretty before the fire.
They filmed some of Gone With The Wind here in Paradise.
Paradise...
More than six months later and reconstruction and recovery
was still under way.
I mean...
..everything is different.
It's not...it's not Paradise any more.
Laurie Peters used to live here in Paradise.
She was returning to the town and her home
for just the second time since the fire.
There's my house.
Oh, my God.
Laurie, it's like a missile has hit the house.
Everything just burnt down to nothing.
On the day of the fire...
..when did you hear that it was coming?
We had no more than two minutes to leave.
Two minutes? Yeah.
I swear to God, two minutes.
And... What do you grab in two minutes?
Well, first thing I thought of, the animals.
Then I thought of my husband that died,
I had his ashes,
and I brought them and we got the kids and we left.
You could feel the heat.
And it was raining down soot like a...
It was just a soot storm.
It was a storm.
We honestly thought we were going
to die, because we saw people
on fire, cars on fire...
It was hell. It...
It was hell.
It was so cruel to take all these people's lives
and their everything.
Thank you so much. Thank you very much.
What happens next for you?
I don't know.
I have no clue where I'm going,
what I'm doing, which city I'm going to live in.
Little steps. Baby steps.
Baby steps.
That's what my mum said.
See the X on that?
That means it's been checked for bodies.
Wildfires in California are getting worse, deadlier,
more unpredictable, more ferocious.
There's been a severe five-year drought in the state.
There's tens of millions of dry and dead trees,
effectively huge matchsticks,
and the number of people living in the suburbs
and wilder areas keeps increasing.
It's all a perfect storm of conditions
for devastating wildfires.
But smaller forest fires do have a natural role to play
in this environment.
We've met up with the US Forest Service and we're heading out
on one of their operations.
So, this is Travis.
Travis, who is the division group supervisor.
Good morning.
It's a pleasure to have you.
Where are we going?
We're headed up to our prescribed fire project,
so we're going to burn about 140 acres.
This is a big operation.
I don't know if you know anything about the Hot Shots,
but they're like the elite firefighters.
We're planning 143 acres today.
Most of the brush that we have out here is that white thorn
and we can burn up to 80% of that.
So, we can burn a lot of brush out of here.
So, those are our objectives.
So, the guys have kitted it up.
From what I can tell, there are two teams,
one who are setting the fire and the other team who are prepared,
always ready and able,
to put it out if it gets slightly out of control.
So, who is setting? These guys.
Look, he's just lighting them.
He's setting the ground on fire.
Under controlled conditions and with animals cleared from the area,
the firefighters are trying to let their small fires clear brush
and deadwood on the forest floor to stop it becoming fuel
for much bigger, apocalyptic wildfires.
They've picked a day with low winds to minimise the risk of fire spreading.
Now, stick the wick in there.
There you go, and now pour it over a little bit.
That's how you do it. Just like that.
Goodness me.
There you go, catch some of the needles.
OK.
Oh, my God.
That's 15 seconds.
And the heat is already so intense.
This is, er, a sort of eyebrow-singer.
The ease with which you can start a fire is, quite frankly, horrifying.
This ecosystem needs natural forest fires,
perhaps started by lightning strike.
Some seeds only germinate after a forest fire.
They sense smoke.
Look at that! Look!
Almost all of the trees here will survive a controlled burn
like this and thrive again.
Oh, my God...
But recent wildfires in California have been more like the apocalypse.
That is extraordinary.
Look at the tree!
There have been wildfires with walls of flame
hundreds of feet high,
consuming an acre of forest per second.
You can see it's getting up into the canopy here
and the danger in a real wildfire is that, when the fire's up there,
it starts to skip through the trees
and, when a real wildfire takes over,
the speed at which the flames can move is astonishing.
30mph.
A fire moving through the forest.
It's not something you can always outrun.
This is DJ, here,
casually but professionally walking through the fire!
Another day at the office!
How have you seen things change when it comes to fire?
From when I started as a firefighter,
the type of fires that I went
to were nowhere near as intense as they are now.
And I used to fight fires out in the landscape
like this, in the forest.
In the last three years, I've been fighting fires
in people's back yards.
So, is it behaving as you would like at the moment?
We're getting the consumption we're looking for.
These are excellent conditions.
With dry, dead wood and undergrowth burnt away,
at least this small area should be less vulnerable
to a devastating blaze.
But across this state, a more ferocious type of wildfire now poses
an enormous threat.
Experts have warned here that the conditions exist
in large areas of California for there to be fires on a scale
we haven't seen for decades.
They talk of firenadoes, they talk of clouds that look
like the aftermath of a nuclear conflict.
That is the abnormal rapidly becoming the new normal.
FIRE CRACKLES
I pushed on south.
TRAIN HORN BLARES
Goes on for bloody ever!
CROSSING BELL RINGS
I was arriving in California's Central Valley, a huge farming area
that's the blooming heart of the Golden State.
Just look at this!
It's an area of California few tourists see.
The Central Valley provides a bounty for America.
Half of all the fruit and vegetables eaten in the US...
Ooh-ahh! ..are grown here.
The Central Valley is
hundreds of miles long, it's dozens of miles wide.
It is the largest area
of class one soil in the world,
the best on the planet.
There are more than 60 food crops in which California leads the nation,
growing virtually all of the almonds, artichokes, dates, figs,
raisins, kiwi fruit, olives, peaches, pistachios,
prunes, pomegranates, walnuts.
And then there's their wine, which isn't bad!
That's part of the reason this state, if it was an independent
country, would be the fifth biggest economy in the world.
Much of the money from agriculture here goes to corporations and a few
ludicrously wealthy farming families.
I wanted to meet the people who actually do most of the hard work.
We're following a guy from the local farm workers union, who hopefully
is taking us to meet some workers.
But we're not entirely sure how willing they'll be to talk.
Just careful with the ground. It's really uneven.
Armando Elenez had brought me to meet some of the people picking
sugar beet, grown for animal feed but mainly for sugar.
Flippin' heck! There is some hard work under way here.
Look at the speed.
Buenos dias.
Do you think you can show me what to do?
OK. Let's give it a go.
SHE SPEAKS SPANISH
You have to go faster.
Ah!
OK, boss, OK!
Why do they, why are they not coming out for me?
Here we go.
The majority of California's farm workers are migrants from Mexico
or further south.
A farm worker in Central America might earn $10 or less a day.
Here, they can earn more than that in an hour.
But it's still backbreaking work for low pay.
Armando, there's been a lot of talk in the US about how migrant
labourers take local jobs.
What's been your experience of that?
We set up a whole project called Take Our Jobs, where we are inviting
Americans to come and work in the fields.
We've got millions of hits, which was amazing.
But unfortunately, all those millions of hits, only 12
inquired about actually working and then only four ended
up going to work.
And then, immediately after coming to work after a day,
they basically gave up.
They just thought it was too hard.
Not one lasted a single day? No.
So, if it was all left up to Americans, this country
would have trouble feeding itself? Very much so!
Yeah, I'm already dismissed. I'm sacked already!
We've been told we can't talk to them about their legal status,
but we've also been told that almost all of them
will be undocumented migrants, ie illegal immigrants.
They're living in constant fear of arrest and deportation.
But they also face many issues with the conditions
in which they're actually living.
There's around two and a half million undocumented or illegal
immigrants in California, more than anywhere else in the US.
I drove south towards one of the communities where
migrant farm workers live.
So, this is a place called Poplar.
This is what's called an unincorporated town.
There are hundreds of these across central California,
and they're basically towns that don't have all the facilities
and aren't on the grid the way established American towns are.
How are you, sir?
Thank you for letting us come to visit.
It's just big chunks of meat.
Cristobal Chavez and his wife Nora have raised their large family,
including children they fostered here in Poplar.
Like many in unincorporated towns, they don't have access
to mains water.
Instead, they draw up their own supply from the ground,
which has become an increasing challenge.
So, this is the well. Yeah.
Or a bore hole, even.
How far down does it go, Chris?
First of all was 138 feet.
When the well dries, 210 feet.
210 feet? Wow!
The water the family draws out of the ground has been found
to contain several times the legal level of contaminants.
It's the sink! We haven't dressed the set here and we haven't given
them any time to prepare.
Should you be able to drink that?
How long had you been drinking the water when you realised
that it was contaminated?
So you have to use gallons and gallons of bottled water, then?
Uh-huh.
Wow.
More than a million people in California don't have access
to clean drinking water.
With droughts and shortages, California's got a water crisis.
And water intensive farms have helped run the state dry.
It's been claimed agriculture accounts for up to 80%
of all the water used in California.
One single almond can take a gallon of water to grow.
And it's said the water used each year to grow almonds is equivalent
to three years of water for the entire city of Los Angeles.
And the meat? Producing one pound of beef
can take 2,500 gallons of water.
To grow crops out here in the Central Valley,
particularly in recent years when there's been incredible droughts,
the farmers are having to tap into great pools, lakes of water
that are buried deep underground.
And over the years, they've been putting so many wells
and the equivalent of drinking straws into those deep pools
of water that those pools have been sucked dry.
So much ground water has been pumped out of the earth here.
The landscape has been transformed.
Across a huge area, the ground is sinking.
To give you a sense of how the land has shifted and collapsed,
just look at the pole here. In this area...
..the land has fallen by about ten feet.
So, that's somewhere up here. But there are areas around here
where the land has collapsed
by 60 feet.
That is about...what?
Almost twice the height of the pole.
It's said to be one of the largest man-made alterations to the surface
of planet Earth.
It's also completely mad!
Pressure on the water supply in California has increased
dramatically as the number of people living in the state has rocketed.
The population has tripled in the last 60 years.
I headed to the West Coast.
Look! The Pacific.
We're on the coast.
This is the California of the cliche, of wealth
and beach and surf.
It is stunning!
Come out of the California hardly anyone else ever sees,
and we're heading now into the city of Los Angeles.
LA, Hollywood.
It's a dream factory drawing in millions of Americans
and outsiders hoping to make it big.
For some, the lucky few, it can deliver.
I don't really see the attraction of these stars.
Then I saw Harrison Ford.
I thought, "Well, that's impressive!"
California has always being the most aspirational state in the US.
Over the generations, of course, people have seen it as some sort of
Eldorado, a promised land.
It's all quite tacky, of course, but it is quite fun.
But for the full experience, I've got to do a tour.
Just in the back?
All right, guys.
Welcome to Hollywood.
Mic check, baby. Give me a thumbs up. Everybody can hear me, yes?
OK. Hollywood, here we come.
Of course, when the sun goes down, guys, that's when it becomes
Hollyweird, right? Hollyweird. Not dangerous, just crude.
I just like to check the sanity level of the driver.
A lot of people ask, why is LA the entertainment capital of the world?
That has a lot to do with the weather.
About 320 days a year,
blue skies and sunshine.
But we're going to start making our way into Beverly Hills, guys.
As we get a little closer I want you to take a deep breath of air and
I want you to smell all the money,
because your average price home in Beverly Hills these days start
right around ten mil. Bloody hell!
Take a look at this giant white castle on the Hill.
$88 million.
Jay-Z and Beyonce's house.
The wealth here is just on another level.
All right, guys.
We're going to pull into the parking lot of Crescent Heights
and Sunset Boulevard. Pollo Loco. 1986.
This was Brad Pitt's first Hollywood job.
No! He got a job dressed as a chicken,
passing out free samples.
It's brilliant.
I'm not going to lie, man. The chicken is pretty crazy.
I love that story.
It does show you can come here with next to nothing and make it big.
Live that dream.
All right, kids, that's the end of the tour.
It has been my pleasure.
And now it's time for a mic drop.
We survived.
Whoo!
I'm off to meet a man now who's going to show me a very different
side of Los Angeles.
Wealth in the United States is now more concentrated
than it has been for nearly a century.
This country is hopelessly unequal.
40 million men, women and children live in poverty.
Half a million Americans are homeless.
And the problem can often be seen at its starkest in the back streets
and the shadows of the City of Angels.
So, we're meeting a bloke on the top
of a multistorey car park.
Perfectly normal.
Hello. Nice to meet you.
Brett?
Yeah, I'm Brett. Brett. Simon Reeve. Lovely to meet you.
Great. Nice to meet you. Thank you so much for having us along. Hello.
Hi! Gabrielle. Gabrielle. Simon. Lovely to meet you too.
Brett Feldman and Gabrielle Johnson
are street medics taking health care and TLC to the homeless
of Los Angeles.
These are all people living out of vans.
Oh, God, you guys are like a new pair of spectacles. As soon
as you say that, you start seeing the world slightly
differently, of course. Now I see all these vans along here that I
presumed were just for residents. Actually, these are people's homes.
Oh, yeah. You can see this this car right here.
Not just the van, the car as well. Yeah.
Oh, my God.
Morning, Abraham!
Street medicine.
Bed pan's coming out. He broke both of his legs,
maybe a week or two ago.
So, you're partly taking your pills just because you're worried
Gabrielle is going to tell you off?
Right.
I would be worried too!
So, they estimate that Los Angeles is over a half a million units short
of affordable housing.
You have to work over 100 hours a week at minimum wage to afford
a one-bedroom apartment.
So, we're expecting people to work more than two full-time jobs
just to get into housing.
LA is the second most populated city.
New York is number one.
They have 2,500 rough sleepers.
We have 45,000 rough sleepers.
45,000 people.
That's colossal.
And it's actually more than the top 27 cities combined.
In a more traditional clinic, you could just put tape on this,
but in this environment, Doug is going to be exposed
to the weather, to,
you know, some dirt or whatever.
So, we wrap it with this to protect it.
How long have you been out here, Doug?
It's interesting to hear Doug say how grateful he is to you guys.
How many street doctors do you have?
Combined, it's about four.
Four? Yeah.
Four?
In Los Angeles? Yeah.
Increasingly, living rough is being criminalised
by the authorities across the United States.
To crack down on homelessness,
many cities are banning camping in public.
But here, there's still plenty of life on the streets.
There's a lady there filming us on her phone.
How you doin'? My name is Black Blossom. I'm from DTLA.
Hello, Black Blossom. Nice to see you. How are you?
Great.
Thank you for being nosy and come be nosy some more,
because we are really waiting on housing.
You know what I'm saying? I've been homeless since
I was 13 years old.
There probably takes, like, six months to get in the shelter,
because it's a waiting list.
And then you can't even get in the shelter if you have seizures
or you sick or anything like that. Six months to get in a shelter?
Thank you.
Yeah, stay positive. Stay positive. All right?
It's all the way, the whole length.
What is? Where they live.
Inside the bridge, goes all the way.
Inside the structure here?
Yeah, right inside.
FAINT VOICES
This is extraordinary.
There are voices coming from inside it.
Hello.
So, erm...
They're friends from Great Britain and they're doing a video
on the way some folks are living here.
Thank you so much.
Shall we follow you in? Sure.
Hey, Amy. Hi.
Thank you for letting us in. No problem.
TRAIN RUMBLES OVERHEAD
Well, these guys are. I'm like a sort of really cheap,
shoddy version.
Yeah.
You just haven't gotten old yet.
I know! I think I think it's a bit more than that, but thank you.
Are you a big fan of David Attenborough?
I'm a huge fan of David Attenborough.
Do you get to see his documentaries here?
I don't get to watch a lot of video here.
But power's a problem.
But I do listen to a lot of podcasts here, so... Do you?
Trying to take in the artwork,
and I thought it was a freeway, but actually,
it's the train above.
The trains aren't 24 hours, are they?
They stop for about three hours
between midnight and four.
TRAIN RUMBLING CONTINUES
Are you a light sleeper?
No! Ah, right.
That's probably, probably for the best.
Is it you who's done much of the painting here?
I've done all of the paintings.
I even call it the mansion.
Just this place is giant and it gets taller as you go back, so...
There's a couple rooms that, you know, I think
of as the ballroom and the room where the pool will be in.
That sort of thing.
But, yeah, that's my joke with myself.
TRAIN RUMBLING OVERHEAD
Do you feel safe here?
Yeah. You know, there's really only one way in.
The dog scares people quite quickly.
Would you want somewhere conventional? If someone dropped
in my hands the money to pay the deposit in the first month when I
found a place, the rent would still be so very expensive
and it's not worth it to
just work to be able to be alive.
What the hell is going on, Amy?
There's tens of thousands of people in Los Angeles living homelessly.
Welfare is really not something Americans understand any more.
It's a weird thing.
There's so much moral judgment about people.
I think it's mostly fear, though, like the closer they get,
the more they want to distance themselves from it.
Somehow relating makes them susceptible to it.
Thanks for letting us in, Amy. It's a pleasure to meet you.
I've seen a lot of stuff around the world.
I would never have thought in the United States, I would see...
..I would see this.
But thank God you're out here doing what you do.
OK. After you.
What really strikes me about this city compared to almost every other
you go to, there's hardly any cranes,
there is hardly any building work going on.
There is very little construction of low-cost housing.
Nothing that even vaguely matches the need.
Heading out of Los Angeles now onto the freeway.
Scarily big American roads.
I was shocked to see how many people in Los Angeles had fallen
through the cracks.
In the USA, they're more like gaping chasms.
The US spends less on its welfare and Social Security
than most comparable countries.
It's a relatively low-tax country and people aren't mad
on government spending.
Travelling through America, much of the national infrastructure,
like roads, dams and bridges,
feels like it could do with a bit of attention.
So, that up there is the Prado Dam.
I'm going to try and pull over and see if we can get a closer view.
47,000 bridges in the US are said to be structurally deficient.
Many dams are also in desperate need of repair,
even one like this in a populated area.
The fear is that in a really heavy storm
water could overwhelm the dam and a colossal quantity of water
could then flood downstream,
down the river, down the valley, and take out hundreds of thousands
of homes and even inundate Disneyland!
It's very symbolic of how different America actually is,
particularly to Europe.
They hate spending money on public projects here.
In the past, though, the US government has spent big on building
projects, especially at a time of crisis.
Much of the infrastructure in this country
was built decades ago.
A lot of it during the 1930s and 1940s when President Roosevelt
was in the White House.
And as part of his huge New Deal plan to transform the landscape
of the country, but also lift it out of the ravages
of the Great Depression.
There's a lot of people here
who think something similar is needed today.
The 1930s New Deal was a massive government spending plan to
kick-start the economy with public works building bridges and dams.
But it also included a huge conservation element.
Over ten years, around three million previously unemployed young
Americans planted more than two billion trees.
It's great being back in the forest.
They helped create America's epic and glorious National Parks.
I headed up into California's Sierra Nevada Mountains to meet
up with a conservation organization that grew
out of Roosevelt's New Deal.
And he's still out here, still working and trying
to protect the forests.
So, this is Larissa from the California Conservation Corps. Yeah.
Is that right? That's right.
So, basically, we're out here improving the health
of the forest. We dedicate our work to taking out
dead and dying diseased trees.
More than 100 million trees have died in this part of California.
The long drought and climate change have led to the proliferation
of bark beetles that are chomping and killing forests.
So, this tree, it's really dry.
So, what happens is the beetles will go in and bore holes
into these trees and they spread fungus from tree to tree.
I've worked in the Sierra since about 2009 and even
in those years of the drought,
and then with the bark beetle, I've visibly seen areas
that were just small patches of dead trees went massive.
As I'd seen already on this journey,
unless this dead wood is brought down, it can become fuel
for terrible wildfires.
Is this your crew just here? Yeah.
These look like burly blokes!
Falling!
Bloody hell!
To protect and preserve the natural wonder of the state,
the Conservation Corps recruits 3,000 volunteers each year
from across California.
3,001 this year!
Don't worry, we're fine.
We've got this.
When you hit it,
try to give it a nice thud.
OK. Good hit. And then look up. All right.
All right. Take in a safe route. Tree falling! Move out.
You did great.
Dinner's ready, waiting for us at camp.
I did do the smallest amount of work possible.
In truth, I'm not really sure I qualify for this.
Just like the original New Deal conservation movement, the work
of the Corps out here in the Californian wilderness
is changing lives as well as the environment.
Can I join you?
So, main reason I joined the programme at the time, I was at the bottom
of the bottom. You know, I was scraping cans off the floor
and everything like that. I was doing drugs at that age at 18.
So, my mom told me about the California Conservation Corps.
I'd been in the Cs for about three years.
And in that time I've got my diploma and a couple of, like,
you know, certificates.
I'm grateful that I had this programme, because if it wasn't for
this programme, I don't know what I'd be doing right now.
Are you saying the Corps has transformed your life?
Yes, 100%. Straight 360.
I wouldn't trade anything in the world.
Damn, this smoke's in my eyes!
I swear I'm not crying, you guys, I swear!
Is this a tough guy getting emotional?
Yeah. "It's just the smoke. It's just the smoke."
Plus, I'm a little sinusy right now, too, so that doesn't help.
Before I joined the Cs, I was homeless on and off most
of my life from I think around the age of three until high school.
There's bullies.
There is, I'm not going to say details for this, but there was
suicidal tendencies that happened a few times.
And then out of nowhere my history teacher walked in.
He's like, going to join the California Conservation Corps
and that, just like that, I'm like, all right.
Did he you give any sort of spiel for it?
This is why? Or... No, he just showed me the website.
It said, "hard work, low pay, miserable conditions and more."
That is the least America motto I think I've ever heard!
And you thought, "Yeah, that's for me."
Ever since, I'm on my third year.
I know what I want to do with my life.
And I'm happy.
THEY CHATTER
Is there a sort of social justice aspect to the Conservation Corps?
It's not just to make the environment better.
You know, you become a family. Brothers and sisters.
You work together, you work the long, hard hours together,
you learn together. You grow together, you fail together, you
know, all those different things. Yeah.
And so I do think it's making a positive impact in our communities.
But you just want to get it across the whole table
without splashing any more. I get the exciting job, then!
Nearly! Nice!
You got a couple of scraps.
Good job, man!
This is a new, obscure Japanese game.
Designed to mess with your mind.
You know, when I was a lad,
I managed to leave school without any real qualifications
and I had a very difficult time.
I found myself with no hope in life.
It's been really interesting and inspiring, actually, hearing
the youngsters in the Corps talking about the direction that being out
here and working in the park has given them.
Night-night.
SIMON GROANS SLEEPILY
Some American politicians want projects like those of the CCC
massively upscaled. With environmentalists
and campaigners, they're backing extraordinary plans to invest huge
sums in conservation, renewable energy, reforestation as part
of a dramatic overhaul of the US economy designed to tackle
the crisis facing our climate and environment.
It's being called the Green New Deal.
Now, that is a view worth protecting, eh?
The Green New Deal is a really radical plan to treat our climate
emergency with the seriousness that it deserves and requires,
while also addressing really fundamental social issues
like homelessness, inequality, poverty.
Serious stuff.
Opponents of the idea say America doesn't need it because the economy
is booming with low unemployment.
They say spending huge amounts of taxpayers' money
on the Green New Deal could wreck the economy and cost jobs.
I pushed on south towards California's border with Mexico.
The scorching hot desert down here felt a long way
from the forests and the farms further north.
So, this is Bombay Beach,
which was a bit of a resort at one point, but has since fallen
on distinctly tougher times.
It's all a bit weird.
Bombay Beach sits on the edge of the Salton Sea, a huge inland
lake, the biggest in California.
It was formed by accident a century ago when a canal burst its banks
and over two years a vast volume of water flooded into the basin.
This being America, developers sensed opportunity and dubbed it
"the Salton Riviera." Just look!
By the 1950s, Bombay Beach was a swinging resort.
It was glamorous once!
They built golf courses.
President Eisenhower came here and played a round.
The Beach Boys came here.
Lots of other celebs as well.
It was seen as a trendy place to come.
Not any more.
Look, I've got to be honest. The smell here is, erm...
..is appalling.
Rotten, rotten eggs.
The smell's the least of the issues.
For decades, pesticide and fertiliser runoff from farms
contaminated the water here.
Since they fixed the breach in the canal,
there's been no major freshwater source for the sea, so it's drying
up and dying.
The big problem here
is that this is a really big problem.
This is an enormous sea.
And as the water evaporates, it is revealing dusty, toxic soil
and sand that is blowing up a proper sandstorm.
I think what this part of my journey down through California has shown me
is that we are very good at breaking things.
We are not so good at offering up a fix.
This area of Southern California felt like something
from a Mad Max film.
But there's people who eke out an existence here
and there's those who've made a beeline for it.
Hello. Hi.
Sorry to bother you. We're looking for Jack.
Jack Two Horses?
Go west down there. Hit the fork in the road. And turn left.
Thank you very much indeed. You're welcome.
So, apparently, he lives in the red trailer with the yellow door.
There you go.
I was arriving in the self-proclaimed town
of Slab City.
Jack Two Horses? Yes. That's me.
Hello, sir. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. How are you?
What is this place? What is Slab City?
Slab City is an off-grid community of...
..it's a piece of land that the government owns,
but it's worthless. It's a worthless piece of desert property and it used
to be a military base back in '32 to '52.
When the military closed it, it even became a squatters' camp.
So, this is yours?
This is my little tiny house.
It's powered by the sun. And the sun definitely shines out here.
Uh-huh! Oh, I get lots of sun.
How hot does it get in the summer? Hottest I've seen is
127 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade.
That is skin-melting temperatures.
People die every year here in the summer. Of heat stroke?
Heat stroke. Mostly elderly people,
but I have a friend of mine who is 32 years old that died
of heat stroke. Was his first summer, he was from Philadelphia.
I've met a few Americans on this journey
so far who are saying, "Look, we believed in the American dream.
"We committed to it."
And they feel like they haven't really been getting the rewards
that they were promised.
I was in property management in San Francisco.
I was really getting burned out.
And San Francisco's really going downhill.
I mean, the quality of life there is really getting bad.
And I found this quirky place on the internet.
So I thought, "This is like the Wild West."
You found your piece of land and you put your little border
up or whatever you got.
And then you did your own thing without government
interference, without regulations.
Will you stay?
I can't see myself leaving.
I'm so adapted to this now. I can't go back.
If we come back in 10 or 20 years... I'll be here.
I'm pretty sure I'll be here. Yeah. Yeah.
Jack's story chimed with much of what I'd seen here.
For millions, California offers an amazing lifestyle,
but the inequality, homelessness and environmental changes all have very
real human consequences.
The Golden State is certainly beautiful, but many here live lives
dramatically different from the glam images of California usually
peddled by Hollywood.
This is the end of this part of my journey.
On the next leg, I'll be heading south and into Mexico.
Crossing the US Mexico border, I'll discover a migrant crisis...
Look at all of these people, all these children.
..and a region gripped by a deadly drug war.
There's some serious hardware coming with us.