An Endangered Species in Land of TV Commentators

Despite his lacerating opinions on hot-button issues, Los Angeles television’s only environmental commentator says he rarely gets “rained on” by viewers. Yet there he was walking with no umbrella near the Beverly Center this week when confronted by three men who were angry.

“This was not a friendly little disagreement,” Dennis Farrier recalls. “It was one of those ‘I-know-where-you-live’ things. One of those ‘You-made-hunters-look-like-fools’ things.”

It seemed that Farrier’s sidewalk critics had caught some of his three-part commentary on KCAL-TV Channel 9 this week opposing Proposition 197, an initiative on Tuesday’s ballot that advocates claim is needed to better manage the state’s cougar population and that critics claim is a ruse to allow slaughtering of the big cats for their heads.

“Everything I’ve read about Prop. 197 tells me that it’s about trophy hunting,” Farrier said on the air while slyly mocking the initiative’s sponsor, state Sen. Tim Leslie (R-Carnelian Bay).

The Prop. 197 backers who confronted Farrier were not amused, and let him know before preceding on their way.

This wasn’t the first time the Emmy-honored Farrier had incensed the sports hunting crowd. “Calling most hunters fair is like calling a burglar honest,” he charged in a commentary supporting a doomed 1993 campaign to halt high-tech hunting of California’s black bears.

Although bearish on issues, the commentaries that Farrier writes and researches at his home also deploy whimsy to make a serious point. “I’m looking at 100 files right now,” he said by phone Wednesday. “Here’s one on garbage. Here’s one on feet.” Did he say on feet? Don’t ask.

Do ask him about forests, however. His commentaries speak of the economy and ecology as tightly knotted, in one instance weighing a tree’s “natural capital” against what is gained fiscally when it’s “wacked down.” Yet he’s an environmentalist who fits no convenient niche or stereotype. He’s never planted himself in front of a bulldozer in protest, never chained himself to anything larger than an idea. And he’s as apt to ridicule environmental or animal activists when he feels they’re foolish or excessive as he is to support some of their goals.

Farrier is himself an endangered species as one of only two regularly scheduled TV news commentators remaining in Los Angeles, his co-survivor being Jess Marlow of KNBC-TV Channel 4. The thick-bodied, 54-year-old Farrier is no studio-bound desk potato, traveling to woodlands, water and other locales (including the Amazon once for a half-hour special) to face the camera with his unruly hair and rhetoric.

“I frankly don’t think there are two sides to some issues,” he says, “and they [his Channel 9 bosses] let me unload on my side.”

And unload he does, straddling no fences while addressing topics ranging from slugs, sea horses and “mites that live on your eyelashes” to polluting corporate giants “that want to convince us that we’ll all benefit financially if they destroy the Clean Water Act.” You might say Farrier was a tad skeptical about their promise. “I’m here to tell you that’s a bunch of crap!”

Typical of Farrier, a bunch of bracing candor.

Public response is overwhelmingly positive to his “What on Earth?” commentaries in the 9 p.m. Monday-Wednesday-Friday segments of the KCAL news, Farrier says. And no wonder, for he is unique, someone who can segue to ants from astronauts and make even cockroaches fascinating--an environmental auteur who is just terrific at what he does:

Simplify the complex without being simplistic.

He achieves it by creatively using the technology of television and his puckish sense of humor, good writing skills and an artist’s eye to share with viewers his awe of things in nature both weird and wondrous.

As in tiny gnats that “will only have sex in the ear of a jack rabbit.”

Or barnacles: “The real trick is to mate when you can’t even move.”

Or houseflies: “A pile of poop is a parent fly’s paradise.”

Or rattlesnakes: “They’re born to be lethal, yet they are embarrassingly civilized.” To each other.

Or comparing the unnatural behavior imposed on circus animals with “natural acts under nature’s big top.” A small snake in the wild unhinged its jaw and prepared to gulp. “Mr. Snake-o will not only swallow an egg whole,” Ringmaster Dennis proudly announced off-camera, preceding a drum roll, “but will spit out the shell without spilling a drop.” And with no safety net, too.

Or the inside of an egg. “A piece of fine art,” Farrier exclaimed as symphonic music enhanced a microscopic view of wonderful shapes and colors that transformed the shell’s interior into a gallery for the eye.

Or a courting bird’s moon-walking strut that Farrier amusingly equated with Michael Jackson’s moonwalk, with assistance from “Billie Jean.”

Or the “sea music” of those “stinging blobs of slime” that we know as jellyfish, which Farrier found “elegant rather than primitive,” affirming that “all life, even the simplest organisms, are exquisite wholes rather than hapless heaps.” As he spoke, one of these gorgeous, delicate bags of water drifted on screen.

This visionary merging of video and ideas--to celebrate and use nature to comment on humanity--is quite amazing coming from a largely self-taught natural scientist who says he had not owned a TV set for years when he drifted into KCAL in 1990 and asked for a job after a stint of speechmaking and consulting about environmental issues. Before that he had been executive director of the Smithsonian’s Maricultural Institute for Ocean Resource Development.

“I walked in off the street and convinced them I could be good on television,” Farrier says. In fact, he is very, very good, chatting conversationally rather than lecturing, and totally at ease with the camera as his classroom.

He says he was that way from the start. “That’s because I get to talk about things that excite the bejesus out of me, and that makes you natural. It’s not like you’re trying to stand in front of Heidi Fleiss’ driveway at night and trying to be natural.”

All of us, including kids, have already heard too much about her and, Farrier worries, too little about nature.

“So I’m talking about cougars,” says nature’s admiring super-fan, “a little, 90-pound cat that can leap 20 feet and bring down a 600-pound elk in a heartbeat.” And a hunter that Farrier doesn’t make look foolish.