TV finally sees `green' light, shifts programming into gear

It was Earth Day on Sunday, the 38th since its inception and the first since "An Inconvenient Truth" -- last summer's "Jaws" -- woke the country up to a new fear. Suddenly everything is "green," if only green for a day. The word is that it's not only easy being green, but fun, sexy, cool -- the always schizophrenic Vanity Fair magazine, ordinarily a bulwark of conspicuous consumption, has its second annual "green" issue on the stands, and although there is a certain cognitive dissonance here, like a Prius parked in the garage of a 275,000-square-foot mansion, the package does not negate the content.

Television came fashionably late to this party -- that is, it arrived when there were enough people already in the room that it would feel comfortable -- but you can hear the buzzwords there now (sustainability, footprint, carbon neutral). The coming weeks bring investigations of and reflections on the health of the Earth -- the interest is out there, and TV can't help but be of its times.

The growing sense that the world is out of joint is not new. Back in the 1960s, when that sense was not new either, it was commonplace for members of the younger generation to declare that the older had handed them a lousy world and that they wanted nothing to do with it; they would invent a new one. "Summer of Love," airing tonight on the PBS series "American Experience," is an evocative if necessarily cursory 40th-anniversary look back to the defining moment of this split, as disputatiously lived in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. By the summer of 1968, with truncheons flying in the streets of Chicago, it was clear that love was not, as then formulated, the answer. The following year brought Charles Manson and Altamont and the charter members of the so-called Woodstock Generation leaving behind a field prophetically covered in garbage. Morphing into the Me Generation, they went on a decades-long spending bender that made their parents' vaunted status-seeking look monkish. "Whoever dies with the most toys wins," went one awful motto of the age -- on TV, there was "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous," "Dallas" and "Dynasty," barely palliated by later anguished yuppie dramas like "thirtysomething."