TV REVIEW : Disney Primer on ‘Earth’ Offers Some Specific Studies

In one of the most visually fascinating moments in the Disney Channel special “This Island Earth,” host Kenny Loggins is seen singing the title tune to a group of dolphins behind a glass barrier, noting that this was “the first time I’d ever had a chance to share my music so directly with another species.”

In the hour special (premiering on Disney tonight at 8), Loggins and co-hosts Catherine Oxenberg and Shanice stump on behalf of the environment, mostly aiming their basic lessons at youngsters instead of sentient sea mammals. It’s a decent primer on core issues surrounding endangered species and pollution. But it’s not without its share of gobbledygook, as when Loggins speaks of hibernation as “dreamtime,” concluding that “the great bear can be a teacher, reminding us that we, too, can dream our way back into the order and rhythms of nature.”

Most grown-ups who haven’t been on a mental hibernation won’t be startled to hear that the natural world is going to hell in a tuna net. Nor will they likely find inspiring the montages of stock footage from the Audubon Society, set to tunes such as Shanice’s nigh-unbearable “Keep Your Inner Child Alive.” But nonetheless this might be just the ticket to introduce actual inner-and-outer kids to the world’s enormous changes.

The show is at its best avoiding conservation generalities and providing specific case studies--illustrating the reproductive habits of the threatened sea turtle, demonstrating how slight changes in temperature from erosion of the ozone layer could wipe out alligators and showing how even banned toxins travel here from other continents and endanger the bald eagle.