Conscious Choice: Planet Green

August 2008 | Art & Soul

Planet Green

How many MCs and heavy metal drummers does it take to get Wal-Mart shoppers to change their light bulbs?

By Stephen Krcmar

Show me someone who knows Tommy Lee only as the degenerate co-star of the Pamela Anderson sex tape, and I’ll show you someone who didn’t share my lunch table in 7th grade. To my small group, Lee was the demigod in charge of playing the skins for Mötley Crüe, a band that rocked out at ear-splitting decibels while wearing makeup and tight leather and covering their arms in fishnet stockings.

Eyeliner and high-heeled boots aside, Mötley Crüe somehow made my pack of preadolescent boys feel more masculine. But the Crüe would tear us apart. My pals Dan and Pat locked devils’ horns over who was the bigger fan, an argument that began with a qualitative debate over who knew the most Mötley factoids and quickly moved to the quantitative: who had worn out more cassettes of Shout at the Devil (Dan, 2; Pat, 3) before escalating to near-blows and ending their friendship.

I was thinking of Dan and Pat when I walked into a Memorial Day weekend taping of Battleground Earth, an eco-themed, Road Rules-type of show pitting Tommy Lee and his team against Bill O’Reilly’s least favorite MC, multiplatinum raunchy rapper-turned-actor Ludacris, as they travel the country trying to out-green each other. The first episode broadcasts to 50 million homes on August 3rd on Planet Green, the Discovery Network’s brand new all-eco, all-the-time channel.

Between Luda’s thumbs-down from the Fox network’s #1 crackpot and Lee’s integral role in my pre-music snob days, I really wanted to like Battleground Earth. But the folks at Planet Green were not making it easy: they dubbed Lee’s and Ludacris’ entourages “eco-rages”; the set was littered with eco faux pas like copious bottled water, which the cast sipped while recording a PSA about the importance of bringing your own ceramic mugs, and the episode being taped that day was just plain ill-conceived, a bastard mashup of two game shows that should never have seen the light of the new millennium — Family Feud and the Newlywed Game.

As I quickly discovered, there’s little to be gained from watching reality TV being made. The director is constantly coaching the players, “spontaneous” shots are shot over and over again, and while I found the curious casting refreshing, there was not enough “eco” and even less “tainment,” a term the Planet Green network is also fond of.

In short, it was easy to start sipping the Slate.com Kool-Aid that this niche network is doing little more than turning the “entire earth into a lifestyle accessory.” As Slate’s TV critic acerbically asked, “If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to talk about deforestation, is it a missed marketing opportunity?”

That query doesn’t surprise Ludacris. The Atlanta-bred MC knew the casting — rock star vs. hip-hop star, two notorious bastions of excess — would raise eyebrows, and that critics would question his motives. “People have been cynical about my whole career. It’s nothing new to me,” he explained after the shoot, his young daughter climbing on him like he was a jungle gym. “For those who are cynical, I’d say, ‘At least I’m trying to make a difference with my celebrity.’”

But making a difference wasn’t the primary reason Ludacris agreed to do the show. The rapper, who also has an eponymous foundation, wanted to learn about environmentalism and take his fans along for the ride.

For Lee, who admitted to knowing nothing about the green movement before signing on, the motivation was similar. “You’d like to think at the end of the day that you can change the world, but that’s just not going to happen. Really, all you can do is change yourself and if a few people jump on, that’s cool,” he said.

The heavily tattooed drummer seems to be a different man as he talks about the modifications he’s making on the domestic front, ranging from switching to low energy light bulbs to removing water-consuming grass on his Calabasas property and going solar to reduce the $1,600 electric bill he had in April. He’s even toying with the idea of getting off the grid and has been vegetarian for four weeks, a challenge from his ex-wife, PETA spokeswoman Pam Anderson.

He’s as earnest and enthusiastic as any college freshman in the midst of an environmental reawakening, minus the deafening sanctimony. And that’s a good thing. Because while the lessons in Battleground Earth will be pretty basic for any dyed-in-the-organic-cotton environmentalist, I’m just hoping folks like my grade school friends Pat and Dan are tuning in. Last I checked, these guys were not lining up to watch An Inconvenient Truth, and they would still probably describe Ed Begley, Jr. as “that dude from Six Feet Under.” If this show helps them rock the green flag, I salute everyone involved. And if there’s anyone who can deliver them that message, my money’s on Lee. So bury the hatchet, Pat and Dan. To be the biggest Lee fanboy these days, it’s all about proving who’s the greenest.

Stephen Krcmar lives in Silverlake, California and has contributed to The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Revolver, which bills itself as “The World’s Loudest Rock Magazine!”

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