While the story of the War of the Worlds is significantly impacted by the book from which it is being adapted - about the desperate attempt by invaders from Mars to take over our planet as theirs is dying, dropping into our world seeds of destruction that soon blossom into monstrously effective killing machines. Spielberg plants seeds of his own in his tale, seeds that we have seen planted in many of his other films and which bear buds of some other reality, sprouting out of Spielberg's imagination or cultivated from his distant past.

Closely related to his concept of home is Spielberg's apparent environmental agenda.

The concept of a natural environment in Spielberg has extremely romantic connotations. But nature, especially wooded areas in his films, would require a complete study of their own that I have neither time nor patience to conduct except to skim over some of the details.

By romantic, I'm talking about a pre-Napoleon era when poets, writers and painters envisioned purity and innocence in nature that civilization had ruined. By caging the basic instincts of mankind, we some how cut him off from his sources of strength and creativity. Poet Robert Bly brought back this notion in the 1980s as men stripped off their clothing and went romping through woods beating drums - the result of which was largely developing poison ivy rashes on places difficult or undesirable to scratch.

In many of Spielberg's films I recently reviewed, he seems to replay this theme, making the same argument for his support of nature in his visual and emotional presentations, painting undisturbed nature as apparently pure and innocent - a protective power to which people can flee when civilization twists us into something obscene. This strong argument on behalf of Mother Earth or Gaia would make even William Faulkner blush.

In ET, we find the young alien protected by the undergrowth as he (I think he's a he) is pursued by head-heading trophy gathers who we see only from the belt buckles down (i.e. eye level with ET). ET's being caught away from the Mother Ship also has to do with nature - although whether his gathering of local flora is sanctioned or his own compulsion is never made clear. His ability to restore plants with his glowing finger, too, should be the envy of any suburban gardener who might give up seeking to develop a green thumb by sticking their finger in organ paint or searching the skies for a passing alien ship to give them aid. The woods, not only offer him protection during the early support, giving him cover by which he can escape, but offer a refuge later for his home made transmitter that calls his parents back.

ET is no fluke in this high regard for nature, even if he is its leading proponent in Spielberg films.

In Close Encounters, two scenes come more readily to mind: the frenzied effort to build a mountain in the main character's kitchen and the eventual arrival at the landing site. The main character grabs up an assortment of suburban junk, from trash cans to shrubbery, desperately attempting to duplicate a nature scene inside his head. Other characters find other ways to duplicate this same vision - an unconscious or perhaps even conscious mockery of humanities attempts to remake nature. More conscious on some level in the filmmaker's mind is the protection the mountain and its trees offer the main characters later when being pursued by the military to keep them from gaining access to the alien's landing site.

This concept of man's folly in fiddling with the affairs of nature is played out even more bluntly in Jurassic Park - a theme taken from the original book. But less obvious is Spielberg's spin, this almost anti-civilization view that our social structures are dangerous creations we might look at more closely and that people are less safe in the homes they live in than in the forests they fear.

In Jurassic Park, the trees are not dangerous, nor are those natural things unsullied by human fingerprints. Yes, the male lead and the two children he seeks to protect find themselves facing death as the car they traveled in crashes down through the branches (aka the rolling boulder from Raiders), but those branches also serve to hold back the danger, giving them time to escape. This might seem like an absurd conclusion if the characters didn't shortly later take refuge in the muscular arms of yet another tree, painting an almost religious image of God-like protection.

This is an odd circumstance considering these heroes are lost in a world in which humans mean nothing. But in each case - except in one notable case - death comes inside some civilized structure, a house or car, not the forest. All the buildings offering protection fail - partly because of human greed and folly. The blood sucking lawyer is torn apart on the toilet. The gluttonous technician is devoured in his jeep. The heroic black computer technician is ripped apart inside a concrete bunker.

The exception in this film is notable because it involves a big game hunter - a collector of heads similar to those keychain toting humans who pursued ET.

Hunters violate the sanctity of nature by bringing hostility into the natural world. Most are not there for survival, but for sport - and in this Spielberg universe few sins are as great as a violation of the natural order.

With woods and red weed expected to play such an important environmental role in the outcome of War of the Worlds, it will be interesting to see how Spielberg works in these themes. Will the woods offer his heroes the same protection as in past films? Certainly, H.G. Wells has given Spielberg the appropriate venue in which to play out this personal philosophy, since so much of the original hinges on the core nature of humanity and how suited mankind is to earth. Will Spielberg take the next step in his romantic painting of nature?