A planet of wonder, viewed by an armchair traveler

EARTH Day came and went like a passing dream last Sunday, leaving in its wake strands of a growing awareness, political declarations of love and 10 hours of television.

Its ethereal qualities were due not to the growing sense of Earth’s fragility or to attempts by presidential candidates to embrace it with more passion than their rivals.

The dreamy nature of the day was rooted in those 10 hours of television: end-to-end presentations of the Discovery Channel’s series on “Planet Earth.”

Though there have been many attempts over the years to show us the globe and its inhabitants, including us, it has never been put together with such refinement and beauty as in this series.

What added mood to the presentation of past episodes strung together was a soft rain that was falling over the Santa Monica Mountains all during the day, providing a sheen to the reality of the nature around us. It was perfect.

I don’t usually spend that many hours in front of a television set, losing an entire day and fragments of my brain to indolence. But this was Earth Day after all, and, because I’m not inclined to hold hands with others and dance around an oak tree, the very least I could do was watch a series I had heard so much about.

We live among environmentalists in our small, tight canyon, and word had been carried like the twittering of birds to every corner of the community, saying what a great television presentation it was. The widespread chatter was yet another reason I decided to watch it, so I’d have something to talk about with my neighbors.

“Planet Earth” is less a plea than a love song, only slightly suggesting through both its depictions of the planet and through the soothing voice of Sigourney Weaver that if we want to preserve what we were seeing then we’d better do something about it.

Such beauty. Such a diversity of wildlife. Such rare natural wonders. However it might have affected you, 10 hours of wandering over high mountains and through green jungles made a believer out of me. I felt like I ought to be out there personally saving the Gobi Desert or preserving the rain forests of the Matto Grosso.

There was life in the deepest caves and under the severest of conditions, clinging to the edges of existence if only for hours, reaching toward the sun, flying across frozen tundras, illuminating the darkest places with wild flashes of color, flora and fauna existing in union with the atmosphere.

There was something in the series for both religious adherents and agnostics. Beauty binds. One could watch a sunset over the Aegean and believe either in God or in droplets of water in the air. Miracles are rooted in reality, and if we wanted to think that the shimmering crystals in caves were formed by an infinite power, that was OK too, because nature is also an infinite power.

Planet Earth is not always serene and not only a collection of quiet places where life whispers rather than roars. It explodes through its crust with fire and smoke, and its continents collide with devastating displays of energy. Howling storms eat the mountains away and wild seas claw at the headlands.

Earth’s creatures add to the violence by fighting for food and turf, the strong stalking the weak in the air and below the surface, crawling through the dark woods or over craggy mountainsides, fangs and talons bringing down their dinners. Its chimps march through jungles like armies of men and go to war over invisible boundaries like, well, armies of men, killing all in their wake and then devouring the young in a metaphoric gesture difficult to avoid.

We are closer to animals in Topanga than most places in L.A., and I don’t mean the unregenerate hippies who cling to vapory yesterdays like fragments of an afterthought. I mean deer and raccoons, possums and rattlesnakes, bobcats and maybe a mountain lion or two. Seeing a coyote crossing the road or a red-tailed hawk swooping down through the clouds is a part of our neighborhood. We live with them.

In a larger sense, we live among all creatures on a globe that seems to grow smaller as we connect through electronics. We are joined in fate. John Donne best expressed a feeling of oneness when he wrote, “No man is an island, entire of itself, every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” It should have been included in the series, because the thought was never better illustrated than on Earth Day.

I lay in bed that night after watching an 11 o’clock newscast bloody the evening with scenes of war and domestic violence, and couldn’t help but remember the observation of my grandson Travis on a rainy day when he repeated something he had learned in the first grade. He looked up at the rain and said, “The Earth is crying.” Sadly, despite its fragile beauty, it still is.

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez@latimes.com