Don Cheadle Visits Central Valley | Years of Living Dangerously

The episode that we're shooting now is about California and how we're seeing the effects of climate change here dramatically, with temperatures rising and the U.S. losing the snowpack. How that is having an effect on water specifically, and how the lack of water is affecting everyone down the line.

We're in Toler County, California, which is one of the most important crop-growing areas, not just of California, not just of the United States, but of the world. They've been, like the rest of California, in drought for over 4 years now, and the Central Valley is right now dying in front of us.

So, because of the drought, they're forced to only use water from their wells, which means they're sucking up all the groundwater. Wells are going dry, and the groundwater itself is becoming depleted. So this is it.

Yeah, this canal here has been dried for going on almost 3 years. 3 years like this. We are relying so much on things that we have no control over. I mean, the big picture in all of it is worrying—the real-world struggles that we're going to face if this situation continues.

You know, I'm confident that we'll survive, but I think the drought has given us the opportunity to do this—to share our stories and the fruit that comes from farming and how it feeds everybody. So when we have rain, we'll continue to farm, we'll make crops, and we'll continue to feed the world.

We do know with climate change, droughts are going to be more frequent and of longer duration. People who farm here have got to learn to live in a new environment, which means the rest of the country and the rest of the world has to learn to live with that new environment.

It's alarming. There's no time to waste. We have to bang on the drum and try to get as much attention as we can, however we can.