Humanity hurtles toward doom. Species fade into extinction. Global warming threatens the planet. There's only one thing left to do — create a reality TV series.

Call it "Battleground Earth." Get Atlanta hip-hop star Ludacris and rocker Tommy Lee to compete in a series of "green challenges" around the country.

(ENLARGE)

GREEN HALL OF FAME "Of all the colors in the spectrum, green has always had a good reputation," says Eileen O'Neill, general manager of the new cable channel Planet Green (a rebranding of Discovery Home Channel coming in June). Although usually associated with fertility, in pop culture green has signified strangeness and cool. If there were a Green Hall of Fame for characters who were green and cool before green was cool, we'd nominate these: The winners: Kermit the Frog, the Jolly Green Giant, the Incredible Hulk, the Green Hornet, Gumby, the Grinch, Anne of Green Gables. And for the Honorable Mention wing in the Green Hall of Fame, we'd mention: The Emerald City, "Fried Green Tomatoes," Augusta National, "Green Acres," American money, Ireland, the Green Berets, "Behind the Green Door," Stephen King's "The Green Mile," little green men and envy.

"Each episode is themed around a topic like alternative fuel or recycling," says Eileen O'Neill, general manager of Planet Green, the new cable channel launching this summer that will really and truly air "Battleground Earth."

"So for an alternative fuel episode," she adds, "they're going to be dealing with vegetable oil in a pretty unusual way. Salacious, shall I say. It's gonna be great TV."

Great? It will be better than great. It will be green. And nothing is better than green right now.

"Green used to be just a color. Now it's a big thing," says Maggi Moss, special events coordinator for the Marietta Parks and Recreation Department. "When I went to college in 1993, I had my cute little cup that said 'Reduce and Recycle.' People would say, 'Oh, you're a hippie.' Now it's in every part of everyone's daily life."

Credit — or blame — the greening of corporate America. Today, green equals good — and gold — for countless companies jumping on the Big Green Brandwagon. It's a far cry from 1970, when Earth Day began as a counterculture strike against the Man,

The Palazzo Las Vegas Hotel and Casino? Largest "green" building in the world, they claim. The Oscars? Green as a broccoli smoothie, and never mind all those idling limos. A British company sells Ecopods — biodegradable caskets — as part of an entire "green funeral" movement. The Web site Treehugger.com recently offered a list of "How to Green Your Sex Life" that included phrases such as "rechargeable vibrating toys" and linked to another site called GreenKnickers.org.

Heck, police in a small town in Ohio busted a guy selling green rocks of crack last month. Although in fairness that one may have been a St. Patrick's Day thing rather than a campaign for environmental awareness.

The green movement has yielded a whole new vocabulary. There are green-collar jobs in renewable energy companies. Green fatigue can result if too much green guilt builds up. Greenwashing is marketing a company or product as green when it really isn't — a classic example is the PR company that substituted the word "biosolids" for "sludge."

The greenery has grown so dense that Charles Failla, president of a New York investment firm, started a Web site called Scuppie.com to make fun of Scuppies — his term for Socially Conscious Upwardly Mobile Person — which is basically a Green Yuppie.

"Gordon Gekko has gone green," says Failla, updating the infamous corporate raider's famous quote from the movie "Wall Street" into an alliteratively perfect motto that sums up today's corporate grab for the green — in both senses.

"Green consumerism is what's driving the whole greening of corporate America," Failla continues. "Companies are gonna do what makes money. If what sells is green, there's gonna be a lot of green stuff coming down the pipeline."

Failla is shopping a book titled "The Scuppie Handbook" to publishers, which fits in well with another part of our cultural greening — we like to take it seriously, and we like to make fun of it a little, too.

So last fall when NBC sponsored a Green Week and told all of its shows to incorporate eco-themes, the sitcom "30 Rock" made fun of the very exercise itself with a new NBC corporate mascot named Greenzo. The business divisions were being pitted against each other "to see who can make the most money from this environmental trend," as Alec Baldwin's character put it; Greenzo's motto was "Saving the Earth while maintaining profitability."

This week, NBC is having another Green Week, but the sitcoms aren't participating because of scheduling problems from the writers' strike.

With Greenzo sidelined and Al Gore still a political target, there may only be one symbol who can unite us all, greenly. Who else but Gumby? The little clay figure, who was a friend to the environment before Leonardo DiCaprio was born, recently released "Gumby: The Movie" on DVD with a "Go Green With Gumby" PR campaign.

Joe Clokey, president of Premavision Animation Studio and son of Gumby's creator, says he's been considering using Gumby as a spokestoy for the movement.

"I don't think it's a fad anymore," Clokey said. "I think we're going to be integrating an environmental ethos into everything we do."

Or maybe we're already there, from caskets to underwear, in the world of the Big Green Brandwagon.