Oct. 19--I met Joe Galliani back in 1994 during his Street Sharks phase. Joe, a high-school-educated son of a Brooklyn building super, and partner David Siegel came up with a perfectly lame idea.

They put a shark's head on a man's body. Not quite getting it, I took one of these rubber Street Sharks home and my kids loved it. Soon Street Sharks were a TV show, little Street Sharks showed up at my door for Halloween and Galliani was suddenly my idea of a genius.

Later, because he loves America's national parks as only a kid raised in Flatbush could, he started an online catalogue that's heavy on classic woolen blankets, WPA-era posters and lore. The money taken in by www.theparksco.com goes right to the parks.

Workers write grant proposals and get funding. Last year they doled out $35,000 for things like water filters and powerful hand-held lasers for the Yosemite rangers to give the star tours. It's a good idea from a fit, ridiculously energetic, 52-year-old, married, long-time Hollywood Riviera resident who came out here in 1985 to be an actor.

"And quickly discovered that I had a perfect face for writing," adds Galliani, who might have become a "Sopranos" regular, but instead became something he calls a "subject matter expert."

Which is to say he got a job with Mattel sweeping floors and worked his way up by learning absolutely everything about the toy business. That knowledge eventually put him

into Street Sharks and in line for a Street Sharks payoff that made it so he could start Parks Co. and become an unpaid, full-time environmental activist.

Yeah, he knows that merely uttering those words -- environmental and activist -- makes it so some people will automatically block what he has to say.

And what he is saying right now should be of utmost importance to all of us, especially to anyone who lives on a coast.

To be local and specific, if you enjoy the view from the beach bike path or own an ocean-facing home, you might want to reconsider what you enjoy and where you live (and, by extension, where you park your container ships) because waves might be breaking on your front patio at some as yet unknown point in the relatively near future.

I'm equivocating. That's because nobody knows for sure when enough polar ice, glacier and tundra melt to raise sea levels a predicted, Strand-licking five feet. A U.N. report issued in 2007 gave us until the end of this century to wise up on atmospheric CO2 concentrations, to get it back under the 350 parts per million thought to be the safe upper limit and a point that will not exacerbate rising global temperatures.