This Earth Day, movies are going green and Backyard Wilderness aims to inspire kids to become better global citizens.

The club of scholars named Neil who are good writers and also telegenic is fairly small, with Neil deGrasse Tyson (see “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey”) sometimes seeming to be its only member. But let’s not overlook Neil Shubin, a paleontologist who makes an appealing guide to our evolutionary history on “Your Inner Fish,” a three-part exploration, based on his books, that begins on Wednesday on PBS.

Many nature films feature exotic creatures in faraway lands -- bat caves in the Yucatan, penguins in Antarctica, lions in the Serengeti. But what about the nature that surrounds us on a daily basis? It is just as wondrous and fascinating, if only we'd take the time to notice what's going on.

A field mouse scurries across the kitchen floor. Birds perch on tree branches just outside the house. Raccoons amble by the driveway, and frogs creep across the windows. The film Backyard Wilderness reminds us that wild animals are often close by—feeding, mating, hunting, taking care of their young—and sometimes in plain view, if we humans just take the time to notice.

There are so many once-in-a-lifetime moments in the new IMAX film, “Backyard Wilderness,” it’s impossible to say which is most powerful. (Like which of your kids do you love the most?!) It might be the scene where a wood duck hatches in its nest, 70 feet up in the cavity of a tree. Or when it leaps down (to the sound of Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’”), landing on the leafy forest floor before following its mother to a pond.

A new IMAX movie launching at the Tennessee Aquarium on Friday will highlight wildlife commonly found in the eastern United States. The film, titled "The Wild Around You 3D," tells the story of a fictional girl who is screen-obsessed. The girl is challenged by a school assignment to look near her home for wildlife. The assignment changes the course of her life and shows viewers the scope of nature that can be found in many people's backyards.

Parents need to know that Backyard Wilderness is a nature documentary that dramatizes how meaningful it can be to step away from screens and into the wilderness right outside -- or near -- our homes, particularly for children and teens. Although there's a brief fictional framing story, this is fundamentally a wildlife documentary, with lots of time-lapse footage to educate younger viewers about seasons' impact on animal life cycles and habitats.

It’s not the paradise that germophobes might imagine.

You can see the consequences of this dystopian fan fiction in the video below—the seventh in a series of online films produced by HHMI Tangled Bank Studios, which adapt the stories in my book, I Contain Multitudes.