Like Guy Martin (who could recently be seen on Channel 4 looking at Japan from a refreshingly different angle to previous documentary makers), Reeve has something of The Fast Show's Brilliant Kid about him but, even more so than in his earlier programmes, his enthusiasm is balanced out by a geopolitical curiosity about the countries he's visiting and an attempt to understand the problems that afflict those that live in the margins of their own societies.
During BBC2's five part series The Americas with Simon Reeve, our handsome hero travels through Canada, USA, Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Costa Rica (it's unclear what the Hondurans and Nicaraguans had done not to merit inclusion and it's to be assumed that Panama will be picked up when Reeve starts his next journey through South America) meeting locals, admiring flora and fauna, diving (Reeve loves a chance to don the wetsuit), and, more than ever, perhaps inspired by David Attenborough's recent work, looking at how climate change and environmental mishandling is affecting not just the future of the planet - but what's happening on Earth right now.
It's more hard hitting than normal, the times we're living in demand that, and yet Reeve handles it all as deftly as ever. Reeve's five thousand mile journey begins with him wading through the snow of Alaska, the largest state of the US, to Denali National Park. Denali, described by some as the "roof of the continemt" and by Reeve, of course, as "astonishing" and "breathtaking", is at the sharp end of climate change. The new lakes that have formed from the water created by melting glaciers and the holes in the glaciers that still stand are absolute evidential proof of the reality of global warming/climate change.
XR is far from perfect but at least they're getting out there and turning the conversation towards these issues. A fifty year old troll sat behind his keyboard is doing nothing but assuaging his own guilt and exerting his own privilege. It's presumed Reeve's carbon footprint is heavier than most of ours (and, no doubt, the trolls will point to this in their endless attempt to make life one great shouting match) but at least he's making use of his opportunity to show us the bigger picture.
The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is the size of Scotland but has not one road. It does, however, have polar bears, arctic foxes, wolves, and caribou. As well as a huge pipeline sending 'dirty oil' through its pristine wilderness. The US government want to open it up for drilling and development. GDP, and the pursuit of money, once again are being put above preserving environments that actually keep us alive. Money's useless when we're dead but governmental administrations think no further than the next election.
It's a forbidding look place, for sure. Reeve, a good listener, hears how the oil industry has funded a permafrost freezer in Kaktovik to keep the whale meat fresh and how caribou undertake the longest land migration on the planet, taking in temperatures as low as -60c. He even joins a caribou hunt (I'm a vegetarian but I'd rather see people killing animals for their own food than people eating processed meat and waffling on about how much they love animals) where a local tells Reeve how he butchered his first caribou when he was just eight years old!
Over the border in Canada, Reeve arrives in the province of Yukon. Yukon alone is twice the size of the UK but has a population less than a third of that of Basingstoke or, as Reeve puts it, fewer people live in the whole of the Yukon than do in Merthyr Tydfil. Dawson City, Yukon's second largest city (pop:1,375), is a six hour drive north west from Yukon's capital Whitehorse and was once the central city of the Klondike Gold Rush of 1896-99.
There are more than two million lakes in Canada and the country also boasts a taiga much like Russia. In fact, strictly speaking, it's the same one as in Russia. But this most beautiful of lands also has a dirty secret. The bitumen tar that makes oil from petrol has resulted in chimneys spewing out smoke from oil mines and huge lakes of toxic sludge (it's assumed the Canadian tourist board don't count these among the two million). Some observers have opined that it's the largest and most destructive project undertaken in all human history.
They're all in the state of Alberta and the justification behind their existence is, you guessed it, they increase the GDP of the country. They make money so who cares if they kill the planet at the same time? Money and GDP are God and it's surprising just how many people think the death of all life on Earth is worth it if there's profit in it. If that's not depressing enough the money made in Alberta, as elsewhere, goes only to those who are already rich.
Racism is rife, children have been taken away from their parents, and hundreds of (some say up to four thousand) indigenous women have gone missing, presumed murdered, in recent years. Many are saying it's nothing short of genocide. In Canada. Now. In the 21st century!
Reeve listens intently. He's clearly a thoroughly decent guy and though you get the impression he'd rather be reporting on more positive news (and we'd all, surely, be rather hearing it) he does a great job of striking a balance between admiring the natural beauty of the Americas and gently prodding and probing at how us humans are destroying both the natural world and each other in our constant pursuit of wealth.
If Reeve needs to be this political then that says a lot about where we are and where we're heading. His authentically Tiggerish manner doesn't stay suppressed for long though. Landing in Vancouver in a seaplane he's all excited again. Vancouver regularly tops lists of the world's best cities to live in but this series, as has been established, is not one to dwell on the traditional tourist sights so it's not long before Reeve finds himself in the run down parts of Vancouver looking at the city's homelessness, drug addiction, and mental health problems.
He's not scared of the odd hug and he doesn't look down on the people there. Instead, he realises that how unfortunate circumstances could put any one of us in this precarious situation. In that he is far more statesman like than our current lying, blaming, morally corrupt incumbent - Johnson.
Whether or not he'd make a good politician is debatable (Reeve that is, Johnson is a demonstrably terrible one) but he's certainly got the skill set required when it comes to being a great documentary maker. On arriving in the US, Reeve first takes a train through the Rockies and out into the prairie. Montana is larger than Germany but has a population smaller than that of Birmingham.
It's Frontierland, big sky country. But even with that in mind it's still remarkable that Reeve should rock up at a ranch that is two hundred square miles in size. Bloody hell! Bonkers! Completely epic! Although you'll need to search for a new adjective to describe the sight of a heifer with a faceful of porcupine quill.
Still, it's nothing compared to what the farmers do to them. It's rare to see cowboys dealing with actual cows but the way of life is threatened. Combine harvesters don't come cheap and most youngsters aren't taking up ranching as a way of life. It's a manly, macho, environment where people don't talk about their problems and, possibly related, Montana has the highest suicide rate in the whole of the US.
If that's not bad enough, humans gas and shoot them because they compete for grass with livestock. If there's one thing worse than being a suicidal cowboy in Montana, it's being a prairie dog. At the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in the state, Reeve has a brief chat with the fantastically named George Horse-Capture (who Wikipedia informs me died in 2013 suggesting this show has been a long time in the making) before heading south to Utah.
Could the offer of multiple wives (and, you'd imagine, more children than normal) be responsible for the fact that the Mormon church is still growing in the US while elsewhere in the country Christianity is, thankfully, in decline?
If there's anything in America worthy of worship it's the landscape. The awe inspiring sandstone rock formations of Arches National Park are as impressive as anything anywhere in the world and they're far from the only site of incredible natural beauty in the country. But we're not stopping to look at that long. Reeve's taking us to an unusual small town in Colorado instead!
Garden City doesn't look anything special at first sight. But it's different to other towns. For one thing it's held to be very well policed. For another, possibly connected, the money in Garden City comes from marijuana depositories. It's a dope economy and the cops (or at least the one Reeve talks to) like it. He claims the local users are never aggressive, they're always nice and, most of the time, all they want is cookies, soda, and cartoons!
The US has the world's highest per capita prison population (El Salvador and Turkmenistan are 2nd and 3rd, you're ten times more likely to go to prison in the US than you are in, say, Denmark or Slovenia). What was that about the 'land of the free'? You're far more likely, also, to end up in an American prison if you're black. A 2017 survey found that despite making up 12% of the US population, black people made up 33% of the US prison population.
It's the way all the recent administrations in the country like it. The prison-industrial complex is a term that's come to be quite well known. It ascribes the huge increase of the prison population to privatised prison groups and the businesses that supply them and the way that cheap prison labour helps boost the US economy.
If you can get someone in prison to work for you for next to nothing why pay someone else to do the job? Considering there are parts of the country where you can be fined for having mismatched curtains and the inability to pay a fine can lead to a custodial sentence there's always a ready supply of prisoners and, therefore, a ready supply of cheap labour.
It's a billion dollar business and it's a system that works for the rich and for the bosses, and systems that work for the rich and for the bosses very rarely get changed. Canyon City in Colorado has a population of just over 16,000 but you can add another nine thousand to that number if you include the inmates of the city's ELEVEN prisons! Many of whom who are put to work making license plates for the state of Colorado.
Reeve starts his journey through the Golden State with a journey through the redwood forest, the enormous trees, the 'Titans', the 'blue whales of the plant world'. When I visited three years back their enormity blew my mind and I was amazed at just how many of them there were. I was even more astonished to learn that about 95% of them have been chopped down and outraged to hear that poachers are still chainsawing them down now.
Reeve has a look inside a 3000 year old living tree and then visits the aftermath of the Paradise wildfire that destroyed 13,000+ homes and took over eighty lives. Reeve barely needed to mention climate change here. The destruction wrought by California's deadliest ever wildfire did the talking for him.
There are about two and a half million illegal immigrants in California and many of them live in what are known as 'unincorporated' towns. Reeve, of course, visits one. Water comes from a well because California has a water crisis going on right now. Almonds and beef require a lot of water and the population of the state, people need a lot of water too, has trebled in the last sixty years.
Attracted by sunshine, big tech, the beautiful beaches, and, most famously, the dream factory. Hollywood! The coast road into Los Angeles is as cinematic as any on Earth but very few actually get rich when they arrive there, and you'd need to be very rich indeed to be able to afford a property in Beverly Hills where the average house price is now $10,000,000.
Jay-Z and Beyonce's gaff is eight times that! People don't get that wealthy without other people suffering in poverty and, elsewhere, in LA people live in their vans or cars and rely on medical handouts to stay alive. There are 45,000 rough sleepers in the City of Angels (the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, down to 28th next US cities with the most homeless combined still don't equal that number) and to afford a room if you're on minimum wage you'd need to work one hundred hours per week. Over fourteen hours each day. Seven days a week.
There's no enthusiasm these days for spending on public projects in America. FDR's New Deal that lifted, or helped lift, so many out of poverty seems a very long time ago. Those that would like a return to it, like Bernie Sanders, find themselves all but unelectable. Reeves moves on to Bombay Beach near the border with Mexico.
Because it's a travelogue (and this time an epic one), Reeve is on the road again. This time to the US/Mexico border. There's no wall when he arrives because, here - for 1,200 miles, the Rio Grande IS the border. Elsewhere there are fences and the like but the dangerously strong current of the Rio Grande deters plenty from trying.
Not all though. Of course. Reeve meets with some 'wetbacks' who have illegally entered America from El Salvador, Honduras, and Ecuador. Many of them are just kids. Agent Rivera, whom Reeve hitches a ride with, is one of the good guys. He makes no judgement on the, to many Americans, unwelcome visitors and he treats them well.
It's insinuated not all border guards are so friendly. The numbers of illegal immigrants into America are staggering. Sometimes, they exceed 5,000 a day. But not many of them are Mexicans and it's Mexico where Reeve heads next. Bienvenido a Mexico. Or is it? Immediately, we're into a world where conversations revolve around drug cartels and narco trafficking.
Is it a cliche or is it true? It seems to be both. In Reynosa, a city not far inland from the Gulf of Mexico in the state of Tamaulipas, the cartels own the riverfront and you need a pin number to cross the river. How do you get the pin number? Through the cartel, of course.
Being kidnapped is a typical experience for a migrant. As is rape. As is human trafficking. The 'good guys' guns we so often hear about in what passes for discourse on American gun law very easily, and very quickly, find their way into the hands of the not so good guys. Reeve dons some body armour and goes out on patrol with a group of Mexican cops.
This is the story we are so used to hearing about Mexico these days but it's far from the whole story about a country that's eight times as large as the UK. Elsewhere in Mexico,wind turbines are being installed, investment is going into clean energy, and the country can appear the very model of a forward thinking state. The world can be a confusing place!
Reeve's not overnighting in Reynosa. Instead, it's a long drive (over twelve hours) south to Puebla to visit a Volkswagen factory. Some of these areas of Mexico are now wealthier than parts of Europe and more Mexicans are now leaving the US to return to Mexico than vice versa. Nearly 75% of all immigration to Mexico, also, comes from Americans.
The indigenous population of Chiapas is the poorest of all. The huge Coca-Cola factory, that receives large government subsidies, provides lot of jobs so that's good but it seems a long way from the rain forests that the Lacandon people once roamed. Now they're marked by the ruins of ancient Mayan cities and the howler monkeys have moved in where, mostly, the people have gone.
I've mentioned how Reeve's going for a more geopolitcal approach than before and that certainly doesn't stop when, in the fifth and final instalment of this half of his journey, he reaches Central America. He starts his exploration of the region with a visit to a mangrove forest on the Mexican/Belizean border.
Belize looks very beautiful. There are lots of dolphins which, perhaps, isn't surprising as mangroves work, essentially, as fish nurseries. Reeve, the jammy git, gets to do a bit more diving, this time into the Mesoamerican Reef, and then gets introduced to the strange and rare manatee. For this area is one of their main homes.
Different governmental approaches to the problem can be clearly seen. When viewed from a certain angle the Guatemalan side is starkly deforested. There are far more trees in Belize. It's not a story unique to Central America either. Worldwide, an area of forest the size of Italy is lost every passing year.
After learning that the corn and maize of Guatemala was created over generations and has no obvious wild ancestor (so if it's lost, it's lost for ever) we soon also hear that Guatemala has the world's fourth highest rate of chronic malnutrition (elsewhere I've seen it listed tenth) and the stripping of the land, the soil erosion, and the drought that are causing people to die and go hungry are also, of course, key drivers in migration.
As long as nothing's being done to address the issues that cause migration, then migration will only become more of a global concern. Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador between them now account for 70% of the migration into the US and San Salvador, El Salvador's capital, is Reeve's, and our, next stop.
Eight year old kids couriering drugs and guns, allegations of government run death squads, and, bizarrely, a beaten up man in the back of the ambulance wishing Reeve "welcome to El Salvador" in perfect English. Reeve's observations seem right to me. He thinks the authorities are all stick and no carrot and that those caught up in the world of gangs and drugs don't really have much of an incentive to move on. More importantly still, all the emphasis seems to be going into prevent street level crime and none of the much higher level corruption that creates the instability that causes it.
I visited there in 2002 and it was gorgeous, lush, safe, and blessed with some of the most abundant wildlife I've ever seen. I was particularly struck by the fact that Costa Rica does not have an army (though I noted that many Americans had invested in the country and should a neighbour invade, it seemed likely the US would not take kindly - then again, this was pre-Trump so now all bets are off).
Reeve remarks on the lack of an army too, as well as how the country is a tropical paradise of adventure treks, iguanas by the side of the road, awesome waterfalls, stunning forests, butterflies, and brightly coloured birds, frogs, and snakes. It's still relatively poor but the life expectancy is closer to Scandivian countries than it is most of its Central American counterparts. It's higher than it is in the US!
At the dawn of civilisation the planet Earth had about six trillion trees. We've since lost about half of them. As Reeve says "we need a lot of them back". The next stage of this journey will take him into South America where, I'm sure, the story will remain much the same. Like this programme I suspect it to make for fascinating viewing and have a message that really can no longer be ignored.
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