A Good Review

"...the most dreadful segment comes first. Yet the special soon settles into a fairly routine if nonetheless fascinating groove looking at environmental concerns around the world..."
",,,For years, I've thought myself immune to the cult of Cooper, CNN's new franchise star, but "Planet in Peril" shows he truly has something: a way of rendering his emotional, not intellectual, response to a story with honesty and clarity."

---

CNN's 'Planet in Peril' plays off environmental concerns
By Ted Cox | Daily Herald Columnist

Published: 12/9/2008 -- 12:06 AM

With the presidential election over, how are the major cable networks going to generate the sort of hysteria that builds Nielsen ratings?

Everybody, it seems, is going green.

Yes, the apocalyptic environmental special - the end of the world is near, and all that - has never been hotter, not even back in the days when Walter Cronkite was looking ahead to "The 21st Century," a show that provided a generation of Baby Boom science classes with film diversions.

CNN's occasional and appropriately titled series "Planet in Peril" is no exception as it returns with its second installment at 8 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 11, but then again let's be sure to place it in context. After all, it's a lot more responsible to be crying wolf over the environment in our age of global warming than it is, say, for a cable news outlet to generate mass hysteria over some missing white girl in an Amber Alert.

The latest "Planet in Peril" gets off to a sensationalistic-enough start with Anderson Cooper and CNN's chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta looking for the potential outbreak of the next AIDS epidemic with "virus hunter" Dr. Nathan Wolfe. They trace the rising consumption of "bush meat" in central Africa, where a virulent disease could easily jump species, with global implications. In fact, it already has, in the form of AIDS and monkey pox.

It's no accident that the most dreadful segment comes first. Yet the special soon settles into a fairly routine if nonetheless fascinating groove looking at environmental concerns around the world under the topic of "Battle Lines," at the competition - human and animal - for dwindling natural resources.

In the end, this is a diverting, enlightening special that, again like Cronkite's "21st Century," wouldn't be out of place in a middle-school science class.

Taken as a whole, the special dovetails, then doubles back on itself. Lisa Ling, the former "Oprah" reporter now working for CNN, does a fine piece on the diminishing worldwide shark population as the labor-intensive shark-fin soup goes from a delicacy reserved for the rich to a widespread dish delivered to the masses. That leads directly into "Shark Tourism," a look at how countries like South Africa are bringing in tourists to see great white sharks in person - through the use of chumming and diving cages. Yet that might actually be training sharks to associate contact with humans with a source of food.

Unfortunately, even though Florida and Hawaii have banned chumming for sharks in our own United States, Cooper has to include an interview with a shark researcher showing that the practice hasn't noticeably altered shark feeding habits. Oops, so much for that note of hysteria.

So he heads right off to return to central Africa to look at the vastly different conditions the endangered mountain gorilla faces in Rwanda and the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo. In Rwanda, despite the vicious 1990s genocide, both the government and the gorilla population have revived by actually encouraging gorilla tourism. In the Congo, where the gorillas are still routinely hunted, they of course haven't fared as well, and not coincidentally neither has the country.

It's an interesting story precisely because it's counterintuitive and yet reasonable. Who would have thought that human contact would actually be good for an endangered species? That turns out to be the case, however.

Yet what's best about those last two segments, on shark and gorilla tourism, is Cooper himself. For years, I've thought myself immune to the cult of Cooper, CNN's new franchise star, but "Planet in Peril" shows he truly has something: a way of rendering his emotional, not intellectual, response to a story with honesty and clarity. "It's quite an experience," he says of swimming quite literally with sharks, outside the diving cage, and goes on to describe their grace and beauty. Similarly, confronted with a group of mountain gorillas, he admits, "They are intimidating animals."

That's the sort of emotional response even Cronkite typically denied himself, and CNN and "Planet in Peril" are better for it. It replaces the tone of hysteria with an air of wonder, and I for one find that much more captivating than being scared into watching.