WEEKEND TV : Individuals Helping the Environment

The Earth’s fragile ecosystems and California’s politics will punctuate the weekend TV schedule.

Today at 4 p.m., the Discovery Channel begins a 13-part series that highlights practical activities that individuals can commit themselves to help preserve the environment. Wade Davis hosts.

“National Geographic Explorer” picks up the environmental theme Sunday at 6 p.m. on TBS with an episode focusing on the zebras of Botswana. The two-hour film follows the migration of the zebras across the African grasslands, fighting off predators and recognizing each other by the patterns of their stripes. Brian Dennehy narrates.

Sunday also marks the premiere of “Life Pulse,” airing at 9 p.m. on the Disney Channel, a documentary that shows the sights and sounds of insects, animals and plants around the Earth. This mostly cinema verite take-off on the natural world’s rules on the survival of the fittest follows an army of red ants as they overpower a scorpion, bats that swoop down on unsuspecting bullfrogs and lions that prey on wildebeests on the open plain.

Sunday at 10:30 a.m., Channel 2’s “Newsmakers” will examine the controversy that has developed in the wake of Gov. Pete Wilson’s veto of AB-101, which would have prohibited job discrimination against gays. Assemblyman Terry Friedman, author of the bill, and Michael Weinstein, president of the AIDS Health Care Foundation, guest.