Planet comes to life in documentary

What is it with the British and nature documentaries?David Attenborough has created a cottage industry with multipart series such as "Planet Earth" and "Blue Planet" and "Life in Cold Blood."Now comes Iain Stewart, who helms a five-hour series, "Earth: The Biography," premiering at 9 p.m. EDT Sunday on the National Geographic Channel and airing over three consecutive nights.It's tempting to blame Al Gore for the recent deluge of land-loving documentaries, but the inconvenient truth is that the trend predates even his years in the vice presidency.A fair question would be: How different is "Earth: The Biography" from "Blue Planet"?A fair answer: not much.Both contain remarkable high-definition video, and both take us over, across and beneath our planet's surface to explore its genesis."Biography" finds veteran BBC host Stewart crisscrossing the globe from China to Argentina, from Yosemite National Park to Greenland, exposing us to geologic formations carved out by wind and ice and other natural phenomena.Night 1 finds us exploring volcanoes. How are they formed? What role did they play in Earth's creation?Stewart then moves to ice, including some fascinating footage of a scientific foray into the middle of a glacier (it was carved out by scientists with jets of hot water) and the realization that some glaciers move at an astonishing 120 feet a day.Night 2 brings "Atmosphere," a look at the various spheres around the planet (the troposphere, stratosphere, et al.) and the role weather plays in sustaining and sometimes hampering life."Earth: The Biography" doesn't get preachy until the end of the second hour, when Stewart ominously intones: "These are warning signs."Really?The series ends with "Oceans" and "Rare Planet," which explore the various facets of their titles. You may be surprised at the role ocean currents play in sustaining life.Do we learn anything here? Sure. I never realized that the atmosphere is the equivalent of 34 feet of water covering the entire Earth. Or that I'm subject to 14 pounds of pressure on each inch of my body just in walking around.The photography is spectacular, whether Stewart is hovering on the lip of a belching volcano or scaling a frozen mountain peak to make a point. The man gets around; I'd like to have his frequent-flier miles.His narration can be a bit overwrought (he delivers every new fact as though he'd stumbled across an extinct species), and sometimes his jargon is confusing. At one point he describes something that happened "three-and-a-half thousand million years ago." Wouldn't it have been easier to just say "3.5 billion years ago"?"Earth: The Biography" is less concerned with animals and plants than rocks and rivers. It wants us to learn how Earth was formed, how all of these disparate elements -- water, air, ice, ocean currents -- came into being and facilitated the dawn of man.The result is a series much less cute than most nature shows, but also more emotionally oppressive. You come away realizing that but for a handful of evolutionary quirks -- plankton produced more than 50 percent of the air in the world -- all of us still might be single-cell organisms.That we're not might be chalked up to luck -- or maybe God's sense of humor.(Contact Mike Pearson of the Rocky Mountain News in Denver at pearsonm(at)rockymountainnews.com.)