Planet Green network not what you might expect

Instead, they'll see celebrities such as Tommy Lee, Ludacris, Tom Bergeron and Adrian Grenier--and absolutely no lectures, promises Eileen O'Neill, the network's president.

Planet Green switches on Wednesday at 6 p.m. EDT and runs counter to type. The environmentally conscious network will soft-sell its mission, making entertainment a bigger priority than education. O'Neill calls it "eco-tainment."

The network will immediately be available in 50 million homes, nearly half the nation's cable or satellite customers, because it replaces Discovery Home. Parent Discovery Communications is the latest corporation to realize that a "green" message sells, and guesses that a network devoted to the idea might do better than one lost in the glut of home renovation programming.

The immediate assumption is that Planet Green's programming would be largely educational, or similar to the sister Discovery Network's highly regarded "Planet Earth" series. But Planet Green executives saw that as a dead end.

"The network is not only not finger-wagging, it's sexy, it's interesting, it's irreverent," O'Neill said.

Planet Green doesn't want to be a network that appeals only to tree huggers and will always resist a heavy-handed approach, she said. Instead of scolding people not to waste paper by using juice boxes, the network will profile a person who built a business upon recycling them.

Most fledgling networks are built largely upon reruns of old network shows because money is tight. Since there was little existing material that fit its idea, Planet Green is starting with an unusual amount of fresh, original programming.

Fortunately for Planet Green, no place is greener than Hollywood.

Lee and Ludacris will star, beginning in August, in "Battleground Earth," a series of competitions between the rocker and rapper to determine who's the greenest. HBO "Entourage" star Grenier is host of "Alter Eco," where he and a team of experts show celebrities and ordinary people "the way to a hip green lifestyle."