World Hears Young Voice on Ecology : Music: Love Hewitt’s music video, ‘Please Save Us the World,’ spreads its message at the U.N., Earth Summit.

The focus is on a slender, blue-jeaned young teen as she steps forward from a group of children standing on a breezy green hilltop. She gazes somberly into the camera and begins to sing in a sweet, low voice: “We are young, but our voices must be heard, the time has come, to hear the children of the world. . . . “

As she sings, idyllic scenes of nature are intercut with visions of factories belching smoke, stagnant rivers and devastated forests.

The song, “Please Save Us the World,” written by Lance Cosgrove and performed by 13-year-old Love Hewitt, a star of the Disney Channel’s “Kids Incorporated” series, is the official theme of the United Nations Environment Programme Global Youth Forum. In May, Hewitt addressed the U.N. General Assembly in New York after the music video’s premiere there and she was named honorary ambassador to the youth forum. On Saturday, the video became part of the Earth Summit when it was screened for participants in Rio.

It’s been quite an evolution for a song that was first recorded in December as a rough demo to promote Hewitt to a Japanese record company.

Hewitt, a tiny sprite with a curly smile and bright brown eyes, liked the song’s message--”I fell in love with it from the start, because it was everything I had been thinking about”--but she simply hoped that Mitsubishi Electric’s Meldac Records would like it enough to offer her an album deal.

It did.

Meanwhile, actress Leigh Taylor-Young, active in United Nations programs, was given a copy of the demo by producer-director Glenn Goodwin and was “deeply moved” by “this remarkable girl singing this beautiful song.” She showed it to Noel Brown, head of the U.N.’s Environment Programme, who passed it on to Dulcie de Montagnac, founder of the U.N.’s Global Youth Forum. De Montagnac knew it was right for the Forum “the moment I saw it.”

“It conveys so clearly the very serious crisis the Earth is in,” said De Montagnac.

“We cannot be complacent. We have no excuse and that is brought home in a very dynamic way by Love and her video.”

“The U.N. contacted us to ask if they would allow it to be used as the 1992 Global Youth Forum theme,” said attorney and personal manager David Helfant, who represents Hewitt (and Meldac). He and his client agreed and when large corporate support was not forthcoming for a finished music video, it was funded through a “grass-roots” effort among “all the entertainment people we knew,” said Helfant. Helfant’s Fandel Management company spent “close to $20,000,” and help came from the New Jersey-based Advance America Corp., smaller corporations, individuals and vendors; companies such as Disney and Lorimar supplied the film.

“All those people worked for free,” Helfant said.

The net proceeds from the soon-to-be-released video, and from a planned TV special, will be donated to the United Nations; Meldac agreed to do the same with the sale of a CD single of the song, which was released in Japan in April.

“We are very, very excited,” said Sueo Sekizawa, president of the U.S. division of Meldac in Tokyo, adding that the song has an “international language.” Mitsubishi, he said, which has “many factories” and is “very keen to keep such an industrial area very clean, also supports and promotes this song.”

Hewitt frankly acknowledges the publicity value of her environmental venture; for all her tender years, she’s a show-biz pro. Besides her three-year stint on “Kids Incorporated,” her credits include “Munchie,” the film from Concorde, being released on video this month; a starring role in “Shaky Ground,” a pilot for a Fox Television series “that just got picked up as a mid-season replacement” and a lead in “Magic 7,” an upcoming, all-star live action-animated feature from Earth Savers.

But Hewitt, whose conversation is punctuated with irrepressible giggles, also turns out to be an articulate spokesperson for her peers’ environmental concerns.

“It’s important that people know that even the littlest bit can help,” she said. “Because if we sit back and don’t do anything, then the Earth is going to get so bad that maybe one day it’ll be too late to do anything at all.”

The much-traveled teen--she’s been to such countries as Russia and Japan, mostly due to two years of performances with L.A. Gear’s international promotional tour--has a global perspective. “If every kid could travel, they would just be devastated, ‘cause it’s like you never realize how big the world is, until you go to all these different countries. It’s incredible. You think it’s so small, but it’s huge.”

For her address to youth and adult world leaders at the U.N.’s Global Youth Forum assembly in May, Hewitt discarded her prepared statement at De Montagnac’s request, using her own words to express kids’ environmental concerns. “I felt better about myself,” Hewitt said, “because I didn’t feel like I was doing something contrived. I was speaking from my heart.”

She hopes that the soft-rock children’s anthem engages adults. “Maybe the grown-ups will go, ‘Well, now we know how the kids feel, maybe we should include them some more.’ Because we’re the ones that are going to live in the environment after the grown-ups are gone.”