What is the American state of mind? Literally boundless. The beckoning of the perpetual road trip. The shaking off of fetters. American freedom has been the freedom to move beyond the cramping parochialism of the Old World. Now, that's all come grinding to a halt. Americans are hurting. Americans are hurting today. America has run out of infinity. When it comes to the global debate on climate change, our country is struggling just to stay relevant. Hard times have stalled the American optimism that's always been the heartbeat of its history. The American West has been a symbol of opportunity, growth, prosperity and freedom, discovered as an unending Eden that would eternally provide for this nation. The determination to move on, to engineer a profit out of dirt, be it a harvest, a ranch or a city is the urge that's made America the land of plenty. Understandably, not many people are going to stand up and say, "Stop." But some Americans have been brave enough to say, "We have limits." If we succumb to a dream world, then we will wake up to a nightmare.

This is a much overlooked American tradition that is now more relevant than ever. Oil may be dominating the headlines, but it's the stuff that makes life on Earth possible that's an even bigger threat to the American future, water. of my people! The land of plenty is running dry. Nowhere is it more apparent than on the Colorado River. The Colorado waters the industry, farms and homes of seven western states. But the reservoir of Lake Mead shows white calcium bathtub rings where the water level has dropped due to overuse and prolonged drought. It's now running at below half capacity. In the years ahead, we're likely to see reduced water supplies. We stand warned by serious and credible scientists that time is short and the dangers are great. The most relevant question now is whether our own government is equal to the challenge. The lake makes it possible for the Imperial Valley to put fresh vegetables on America's tables all year round. It also provides water for one of America's fastest growing cities, Las Vegas.

What's driving all of us right now in the Colorado River watershed is global warming, and the effects of global warming on the Colorado River. What we are going to be facing is going to fundamentally alter everything we've ever taken for granted. Just when you think you've got an answer to one problem, up pops another. Biofuels like ethanol may replace oil, but they're made from corn, which needs water, which isn't there. This is a story of paradise lost. The American garden is withering on the vine, drying out. Water. Water for productive agriculture. Water for an increasing population. Water for expanding industries. Water to provide a full measure of the good things of the earth for ourselves now, for our children, and for their children, America's hope for the years ahead. American history has always sounded like this. The founding fathers believed it was the country's mission to populate the continent and grow into a strong, self-sufficient nation. And no one was more eager than President Andrew Jackson in the 1820s to have young Americans embrace their western destiny. Jackson was America's most famous war hero, but he was also the president of the fast-moving frontier. There was nowhere he thought America couldn't settle. And if Indians happened to be there first, well, then, tens of thousands of them had to go. Jackson had no trouble justifying his ethnic cleansing if it helped promote his vision of the frontier as a place of unlimited opportunity.

In a speech to Congress in 1830, Andrew Jackson asked, "What good man would prefer a country covered by forests and ranged by a few thousand savages" "to our extensive republic, studded with cities," towns and prosperous farms, "embellished with all the improvements that art can devise and industry can execute?""" The optimism of the age was obligatory. Trailblazers set out to establish tracks into the wilderness and the riches said to lie beyond. The most famous and treacherous of them reached all the way to the Pacific, and it was called the Oregon Trail. Believe it or not, this is Route 66 of the Oregon Trail in the 1840s and '50s. How do we know? Because these gouges you see on the side of the little pass here were cut by wagon wheels. It's quite quiet and empty now, but you have to imagine a huge traffic jam of Conestoga wagons, oxcarts, mules, people, all forging ahead in search of that golden dream that Andrew Jackson had promised them. New towns were springing up all along the routes as the frontier pushed west. In 1838, a family called the Powells picked up their belongings and moved west from New York into farm country. Pa Powell was a hard-writing, evangelical minister, so of course he called his little boy John Wesley, and the place they settled in was called Jackson.

The Powell family had gone west in search of their own piece of land to farm. But they, along with all the others, were agents of Jackson's grand vision for America. So, John Wesley Powell grew up fascinated by the allure of the west. Only much later would he face a painful truth about his water. His family eventually established a farm in the Midwest. They'd try and make a go of it in the country, models of just the kind Jackson sought, settling the prairies. But it was not all about democratic farming, virtuous and simple. For the big-money boys of the east, there was a pile to be made in the west. Millions of dollars were invested in a transcontinental railroad. By 1869, you could travel the entire breadth of America by train, from New York to San Francisco, and the country had become a truly continental nation. Which is what made the persistence of areas on the map marked "unknown" almost an affront to America's invincible sense that it could know it all, do it all and take it all. Expeditions were sent out to survey territory and to assess its suitability for settlement. One such area that had long remained unexplored was the basin of the Colorado River. In 1869, an expedition to navigate the thousand-mile length of the river was to be led by Major John Wesley Powell, now 35 and a science teacher. Powell joined the men of the Colorado River Exploring Expedition in the railroad town of Green River. They'd come together to explore the last unmapped part of the continental United States.

On the trailer park at the edge of town is one of the great forgotten locations in American history. It was here on May 24, 1869, that John Wesley Powell launched his four boats. Now, this was a journey so fraught with danger that it had defeated everybody who'd tried it before. It was the last great challenge of American geography. But that wasn't going to stop John Wesley Powell. Powell's life had always been linked to the history of his country. He'd fought in the Civil War and a bullet had taken his right arm off. Now his trip would determine how the nation might grow. At stake was the whole future of the United States. His plan was to travel down the Colorado and through the terrifying Grand Canyon. He'd been asked to see if it was possible for Americans to live in that part of the country. To answer the question, Powell needed to experience the perils of the river firsthand. Powell rode in the lead boat, sitting on a wooden armchair strapped to the timbers, gesticulating with his one arm. At the beginning, it was all geological fascination. But as they went on, the river became more threatening, and Powell realised he'd underestimated what he was getting into. But what he was about to experience in the Grand Canyon would be a lesson in humility. We are three-quarters of a mile in the depths of the earth.

And the great river shrinks into insignificance as it dashes its angry waves against the walls and cliffs that rise to the world above. We are but pygmies, running up and down the sands or lost among the boulders. Terrified by their experiences, three of the crew deserted. They were later found dead, killed by Indians, on the plateau above the chasm. One of the boats had been smashed. But with the explorers near starvation, the rest made it out of the canyon. Powell's journey through terror changed his sunny view of the American west. Somehow, Powell had made it down the Colorado. But if he'd won the battle with the river, he'd lost the war, because the Colorado had shaken him out of the naive assumption that its waters could be used to turn the whole of the arid west into a garden that could provide for an infinite number of Americans. Instead of conquering the Colorado, America was going to have to respect it. Follow-up expeditions did nothing to change that cautious view. As head of the United States Geological Survey, Powell never resorted to the booming rhetoric of the "America is unstoppable" lobby. He thought the waters of the Colorado could support towns and farms, but on a small scale. His one great principle was bring the farmers to the water, not the other way around.

This town on the upper Colorado River still represents Powell's vision of the American West. Hello. How are you this evening? In the early 20th century, the damming of a local Colorado tributary gave the town a limited supply of water. Ditches for the water were dug. And plots were portioned out to settlers from the east. So-called ditch riders maintained the irrigation systems. The local farmers still can't do without them. I've been a ditch rider for 23 years. I started in... I think it was '86, '85 or '86. And I've been riding ever since then. This town is everything John Wesley Powell wanted America to be. Water wouldn't just be what you fed to the corn or alfalfa. It would be an educator of local democracy, a tutor in how to get along. The farmers, they think a lot of ditch riders. Sometimes it's not good, but they think of us, anyhow.

Oh, there are some disagreements at times. Some of them get kind of vocal. Very seldom ever get violent, physical but... This is a card box, this is where I pick up what the farmers want. The cards are water order cards. Now, if it's within reason, that's usually what he gets. A few miles outside town, Don lives on a small farm with his wife Jeanie. Come on, Buddy, Buddy, Buddy, Buddy. Oh, where is he? Buddy! Come on. Come on, girls. There's a certain time that you've got to get certain things watered. Like the sugar beets coming up now all need to be watered. And we try to have them all watered before the 1st of May, if possible. And then after that, we water all the barley. Makes it very hard if you've got to water and irrigate everything. It used to be we'd get a lot of rain around this time, but the weather pattern changed so much now that it's really hard to... to get any rain. It seems like it quit raining on us. John Wesley Powell believed a small irrigation community like this, if run properly, could survive drought. But he foresaw disaster if the region was over-settled. Everything he'd grown up believing, dreams of expansion, of the mass settlement of the west, he realised now might lead to catastrophe. But the second wave of migrants were already on their way west.

During the 1890s, government lands were opened up to settlement on a first-come-first-serve basis. What you're seeing is literally a race for the best land. Trains were carrying people escaping from the depressed towns and unemployment lines of the east, towards the ever-growing cities of the west. The year 1893 marked a turning point in the nation's history. The entire country had been mapped now, and the western frontier officially no longer existed. Exit geography, enter technology. The showcase was the electrically lit Chicago World's Fair, where every marvel of the machine age was on display. New technology would enable prospectors to go in search of the mineral bonanza lying beneath the western soil. Most people thought that meant gold, until something else came along. Investors in the west had long drilled for water in the hope of bringing arid areas to life. Often they'd come across crude oil that they thought was a polluting nuisance. But as the cities grew, so did the demand for oil.

On January 10, 1901, on a Texas hill named Spindletop, prospectors struck the largest oil field yet discovered. This single strike tripled American oil production overnight. Oil-boom towns sprung up throughout the west. Wells were left deliberately uncapped to demonstrate abundance and encourage investment. Many believe this second wave of western migration would complete America's unfinished republic. But there was still a big question hanging over all this growth. Was there enough water to support it, to feed the cities, to run industry and farming? It was a journalist who best captured the spirit of the age at an international irrigation congress held in a Los Angeles opera house. William Ellsworth Smythe, newspaper editor, founder of the journal Irrigation Age, was promising to use the waters of the Colorado to turn the arid American desert into the next great pump of American plenty. For Smythe, mass irrigation was the great hope for the American future. He believed in it with an enthusiasm that bordered on religion. Smythe wrote a book called The Conquest of Arid America, in which he prophesied a new era that was dawning for the west, free from the rough edges of pioneer life. Smythe's vision was far more than ditches and small river communities. When he got going, 90% of Americans were still living east of the Rockies. His kind of irrigation was going to change all that. He'd every reason to assume that John Wesley Powell, the patriarch of the river, would be one of the biggest cheerleaders of the plan. But Powell had come to deliver a quite different message. Gentlemen, it may be unpleasant for me to give you these facts. I hesitated a good deal, but finally concluded to do so.

I tell you, gentlemen, you are piling up a heritage of conflict and litigation of water rights, for there is not sufficient water to supply the land. This was not what the audience had come to hear. Limits, can't do this, can't do that, not the American way. Powell was booed off stage. Smythe shot back. When Uncle Sam puts his hand to a task, we know it will be done. Not even the hysteria of hard times can frighten him away from the work. When he waves his hand towards the desert and says, "Let there be water," we know that the stream will obey his command. It was Smythe's optimistic vision of modernity that seemed to have won the day. In 1902, a Bureau of Reclamation was established to finance the damming and irrigation of the biggest rivers in the west. One of its first acts was to propose a project to irrigate the Colorado basin. But it wouldn't be until 1928 that Congress actually passed the bill authorising its construction. It was one of the most ambitious projects undertaken in the 20th century, a monument to Smythe's belief that American plenty could be engineered on a heroic scale. Construction began in 1931, two years after the Wall Street crash and at a time of mass unemployment. Once again, it was a time of trouble that triggered American ingenuity.

In a climate of panic and despair, this incredible engineering phenomenon, all 726 feet high of it, went up in the remoteness of Black Canyon on the border between Nevada and Arizona. It was a beacon of hope at an absolutely awful time in American history, when American plenty seemed out of the question. People hard hit by the Depression came from all over the country to try and find work. Building the American future, that's what they were part of. And they were doing it in shocking circumstances. I'm incredibly hot now and it's springtime. In the summer, when these people worked, the temperatures never fell below 100 Fahrenheit at night and sometimes went up to 140. Seven people died of heatstroke early on in the work. 112 people died all together during construction, from everything you can imagine. Drowning, electrocution, being crushed by rock, pieces of concrete. Yet, amidst all this, the work went on. It was a triumph of American resourcefulness, American skill, and above all, American determination. As the Hoover Dam was being planned, agricultural capitalism had come west on a grand scale. The belt of flatlands across the middle of America, that's now seeing a huge boom in corn to produce biofuels, were transformed into industrial farming country in the 1920s.

Sod-busting machinery tore up the tough roots of the prairie grass. Oklahoma, Kansas and north Texas saw a great plough-up. Now the soft earth could grow something that was going to make a lot of money, wheat. The temptation to make a killing from industrial-scale farming was so irresistible that it brought the most unlikely people to the Great Plains. The biggest of all was film producer Hickman Price, who cashed in his Hollywood fortune to buy 54 square miles of land to show the little people how it was really done. Price used 25 combines, all painted glittering silver. Fifty tractors did the heavy hauling and a crew of 250 kept his mechanical army moving by day and servicing by night. Five motorcycles carried special messengers back and forth across the miles of wheat land with reports to Mr Price on the progress of the harvest. But was there going to be a price paid for this apparent victory of man, machine and money over the ecology of the grasslands? Hugh Bennett thought there was. He was a civil servant from the Department of Agriculture, and he'd grown up on a 1200-acre plantation in North Carolina. Bennett was worried that without the grassroots system that had bonded the soil of the Midwest plains, topsoil was going to be vulnerable to being washed or blown away.

He railed against the short-sightedness of the industrial farmers. For him, the very earth of America was being destroyed. Hugh Bennett was someone for whom the soil of America, the dirt, wasn't just an agricultural statistic, it was America. And he knew that sod-busting was asking for trouble. Bennett, like Powell, proved to be a prophet. In the early 1930s, scorching drought hit the Midwest. Then the windstorms began to blow. Bennett knew he was witnessing a man-made disaster. He was determined to do something about it. But it was too late to stop the catastrophe that now fell on the dried-out prairie. On the 14th of April, 1935, Bennett's worst nightmares came true. It was a day that would become known as Black Sunday. A storm hit the plains, sucked up dirt 30,000 feet high, a monstrous genie of a storm that buried west Oklahoma and east Kansas alive, then rolled towards the cities of the east. Five days later, as it turned the skies over Washington brown, Bennett stood before a Congressional committee. "This, gentlemen,ˇ he said, is what I'm talking about." There goes Oklahoma. Just a few years before, this had been America's breadbasket. Now it was the Dust Bowl. This is what happened to the little house on the prairie. It's a ruin, not just of a physical structure, but the ruin of a particular idea, Andrew Jackson's idea that if you just had the gumption, you could get up and go west. You could have a piece of American land, you could homestead with 100, 160 acres, and you make a go of it as a virtuous democratic citizen on the land of America. And then it all came horrifically undone in 1933, '4, '5. Huge, filthy, great storms that blew in from the horizon, no escaping it. So dense that they blinded cattle, choked everyone who got in their way. You can only imagine the terror, mums and dads trying to get their children out of the way of this nightmare, this huge kind of cloud of horror coming their way. And when it was done, maybe after a couple of hours, maybe after a couple of days, there was nothing left, really. Your soil had gone, your farm had gone, your money had gone. Your hope in the Great Plains pretty much had gone. There was only one thing left to do, wasn't there? Just get up and go.

They became known as Okies. Dispossessed and destitute, a people to be pitied. Hugh Bennett wrote a report for President Franklin Roosevelt into the devastation left behind. He concluded that the situation was so serious that the nation couldn't possibly let its farmers fail. I'm just a-roamin' round I go from town to town wherever I may go in this world any more... My dad couldn't find work, and one of my uncles by my mother's side of the family had already came out, and he said, There's work out here in California. Car after car full of Dust Bowl migrants drove west along Route 66 towards the fertile valleys of California. My mother, who was paralysed, and my oldest brother, who had polio, they rode in the front, and my brother and I rode in the back, back there with all our furniture and whatever we had. are stranded on this road that a million feet have trod and drove me from my door in this world any more and always I was poor and died upon the cabin floor in this world any more: Babe Henry's family settled in the Imperial Valley in Southern California. We lived in what we call a tent house. The floor was wood and about four feet up, it was all wood, and on the rest of that from the... up to the top, and it was sort of into a tent. It was canvas. My dad went to work for a rich farmer in the Mount Signal area. Dad started at a dollar a day. Then he got up to two dollars a day, and we got to move a mile from that house to a regular house. When we went to the elementary school in El Centro, me and my brother got in quite a few fights because we wore bib overalls, which kids didn't wear. City kids didn't wear bib overalls, just the country boys. And of course they knew we were from Oklahoma. And we were called names, called the Okies, which is fine. I still tell people, I'm not ashamed of it. We always had clothes and never went hungry. We just didn't have the finer things in life, but which, if you don't have them, you don't miss them. But one thing that's good about Imperial Valley, we have the sun and we have water. We can grow crops the year round here. The Imperial Valley is one of the biggest producers of fruit and vegetables in the world. But it's in the middle of a scorching desert.

This is what industrial irrigation on a grand scale can do, an American miracle made possible by the opening of the Hoover Dam in 1936. So in that year, migrants from the dust storms got themselves to the valley to work as farm labourers in the fields of the latest American bonanza, the Imperial Valley. The Hoover Dam created Lake Mead, almost 30 million acre-feet of water, a share of which would be channeled to the farms of the valley. It seemed a foolproof system. Dam the river, hold the water, feed the farms, power a city or two. It was going to go on like that forever. In the daytime, you'll find sunning, swimming and golfing fun. But at night, you'll discover the real Las Vegas. Enjoy the trip to beautiful Lake Mead, only a few miles away. It's the largest man-made body of water in the world, and one of the nation's finest spots for water sports. It was the age of the freeway, the supermarket, space travel. Nothing has been able to stop us. We have kept on working, kept on building. Mass production, mass consumption. But at the heart of it all, auto-world America heading out west, hitting the highway. Enough oil for the road trip to happiness never to end. The pump does not know when midnight comes. Days are the same to it. Each day, every day, it brings us another 24 hours of progress, assuring the future of America. Was this what Andrew Jackson had meant? What he had really wanted? What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute? But if that sounds American, the voices that had always said, "Hold on a minute, we're just as American."

And in the late 1970s, at the end of 40 years of prosperity, the voice just happened to be the President. Jimmy Carter was someone who, when he worried about what America could or couldn't do, knew what he was talking about because he was a farmer, a peanut farmer from Georgia. But his timing was tough. He came to office as America was in deep economic trouble. Runaway inflation, oil shortages. With the exception of preventing war, this is the greatest challenge that our country will face during our lifetime. Americans were queuing for hours to fill their cars. We simply must balance our demand for energy with our rapidly shrinking resources. Recklessly, Carter dared to preach an honest realism, urged the nation to recognise its limits. More waste has occurred and more time has passed by without our planning for the future. The dam craze in the west, he thought, made people more wasteful of water. So he vetoed new projects, hoping that prudence would strike. When people see the threat of a future shortage, they tend to increase their wastefulness to be sure they get their share of water that might be even scarcer in the future that's not scarce today. And I know that this is the case not only in water, but in many other areas. But it proved impossible to wean Americans off their entitlement to plenty.

Still, Carter thought it was time for the country to face some hard truths. In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But in the 1980 election, Carter was up against someone who personified American optimism, and couldn't see what was so shameful about the aspiration to plenty, Ronald Reagan. What he's done to American agriculture is just a sample of what he's done to the economy as a whole. my, my, how they fly If we succumb to a dream world, then we'll wake up to a nightmare. But if we start with reality and fight to make our dreams a reality, then Americans will have a good life, a life of meaning and purpose and a nation that's strong and secure. Reagan went to war on Carter's pessimism. And the election became a debate over the very idea of American plenty. He has blamed the lack of productivity of the American people. He has then accused the people of living too well, and that we must share in scarcity, we must sacrifice and get used to doing with less. We don't have inflation because the people are living too well, we have inflation because the government is living too well. Reagan's triumph was also a victory for the old truism that there was no crisis so bad it couldn't be fixed by American know-how, and that the land would always provide. But in this election, neither of the candidates think that. In the years ahead, we're likely to see reduced water supplies. The west is currently in the grip of a nine-year drought nearly as bad as the one that created the Dust Bowl. Fuel prices are through the roof and the economy is in a deep slump. Our economy depends on clean and affordable alternatives to fossil fuels. And so, in many ways, does our security. America is entering a new era when it'll have to face up to its limits.

Nowhere more so than in one of the fastest growing cities in the States, and an unlikely example of American conservation, Las Vegas. What we've seen over the last eight years in terms of this drought has been devastating. And it was a real wake-up call. I mean, look at this town. This town is virtual reality. And yet, I'm witnessing an incredible metamorphosis from a city that was extremely wasteful and extremely environmentally ignorant, to one that is catapulting at lightning speed as it's growing, into probably ending up to be one of the most sustainable cities because of the way it has changed and it has embraced the change. In the conservationist tradition of John Wesley Powell, Hugh Bennett and Jimmy Carter, Las Vegas is having to recognise its limits to survive. By 1989, which is when I took this job, we were running out of water rapidly. Retirees had discovered Las Vegas as a destination at which to retire, communities were popping up, residential development was popping up everywhere. And we realised that by the mid-'90s, we were going to be tap-dry. It was going to be over. Well, by 2002, we had nothing. Lake Mead was dropping rapidly, so there were no surpluses available any more. So, we had to embark on probably the most aggressive water conservation programme that had been experienced in the west. These days, water inspectors patrol the streets of Las Vegas. It's approximately 4:50 pm. This will be a fee for operating a water feature larger than 25 square feet. Do you think there might be conflicts between the town and the country? There has always been some friction between agricultural areas and urban areas as the west has developed. We in the cities can't simply say, "Well, they use 85% of the water.

We have the money, why don't we go in" and we buy out their water resources and just move them to the city? You tried to do that a little bit, didn't you? I think there are going to be, on the edges, some of that happening, but we have to be very careful what we buy. The delicate balance between farming, city and industry that made American progress possible is now at risk. There's just not enough water to go round. And even the prosperous farmers of the Imperial Valley know that. The McConnell family have farmed here for nearly a century. And they're fiercely protective of their rights to Lake Mead's water. We're talking to people in Las Vegas who are responsible for water there. And they were telling us how Vegas and other towns in California, in this state, were trying to buy water from the farmers. The water is not for sale, let's put it that way. We wanna keep all the water we can. Well, the big fear for all of us, all the farmers in Imperial valley, is the fact that people in Las Vegas or Los Angeles will make our property so valuable, they'll buy the land and take it out of production just to utilise the water for other things. And that's kind of a frightening thought because it kind of ends an era We feel that people in the cities and elsewhere... Everybody has to eat, or at least they're going to be on a big diet if we don't have farmers growing the food for the rest of the people in the world. Everybody out there wants to live in paradise, basically, but it takes tilling the soil, it takes water to make food, and food and water are the basics of life.

If the people don't start thinking about water conservation in a bigger way, food's gonna become more valuable, I think, than petroleum and oil and all of the luxuries of life. We don't need all the Tvs, we don't need all the electronics, but we do need to eat. And we could all do with a lot less. There's gonna have to be a lot of adjustments made. Do you think Americans are good at adjusting? How about the Englishman? Bingo. Whether we call it climate change or global warming, in the end, we're all left with the same set of facts. The facts of global warming demand our urgent attention, especially in Washington. So, this is one issue on which both the candidates are agreed, the need for America to come to grips with the slow death of the planet. We are a land of moon-shots and miracles of science and technology that have touched millions of lives all across the planet. And when that planet is challenged or when it is threatened, the eyes of the world have always turned to this nation as the last best hope of Earth. This is the moment-of-truth election, which is what makes it so thrilling to witness. And if it's the end of one era, maybe it's the beginning of another. For when American resources are in short supply, its resourcefulness is not. That's one deep well that's never going to run dry. Someone told me long ago There's a calm before the storm I know It's been comin' for some time When it's over, so they say It'll rain a sunny day I know Shinin' down like water I want to know, have you ever seen the rain? I want to know, have you ever seen the rain Comin' down on a sunny day?

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