Like most 21st Century women, Laurie David tends to keep a pretty full schedule—she's a mother, she's a wife (to Curb Your Enthusiasm's Larry David), she has a demanding career. And she's saving the world.

Well, that last one is only partially true. She'll be the first to tell you that saving the world is a job for all of us, and it can't be done by a single person. Nonetheless, it seems that she picks up more than her fair share.

Laurie started her career working for the David Letterman show and went on to found her own management company, which juggled the careers of many of the most popular comedians and comedy writers in the business. She produced comedy specials for network and cable television and was named VP of comedy development at a division of Fox Broadcasting. But now, David has put all that behind her and devotes her energies to the environment fulltime as a trustee of the NRDC, a founding member of the Detroit Project, and the driving force behind StopGlobalWarming.org—a virtual march on Washington that boasts nearly half a million marchers.

Perhaps most inspiring, though, is the way she has combined her two successful careers. As a producer of Earth to L.A.! (a benefit to raise environmental awareness in Los Angeles), the television special Earth To America!, the HBO documentary Too Hot Not To Handle, and most recently (and maybe the most provocative), An Inconvenient Truth, Laurie has had a strong hand in informing and educating millions of people in an interesting way.

Best of all, recently she was able to set aside some time for a conversation with LIME.

LIME: What are the challenges involved in producing events, TV specials, and movies that are fun and interesting, and contain messages that are educational and informative? How do you overcome them?

LAURIE DAVID: It's a giant challenge and I had two giant challenges this year. When I did Earth to America! I was doing an hour and a half special on global warming but I had to make it funny. That, I think, is the ultimate challenge of our time. And then, helping make An Inconvenient Truth, we had to take a slide show and make it so engrossing that people would sit in movie theaters and watch it. That was also an incredible challenge, but I think that both things worked because there's so much truth in this material, and this issue is so personal. When people sit down and give themselves an opportunity to listen, they immediately realize it's about them. And that's one of the tricks to engaging people—to make it personal.

LIME: A lot of people probably think about it as this large scientific issue that has little to do with their lives until you really make it about them.

LAURIE DAVID: Which it is. It's absolutely about all of us. It's really the most personal issue there is. And nothing else is going to impact their lives, your life, my life more than this problem. I mean, it's happening right now with these heat waves around the country. The last six months of 2006, hottest ever on record! So, this is going to impact everything we care about, everything we take for granted. We really have to start addressing this problem in a serious way.

LIME: There are many people in Hollywood who contribute to environmental causes, but in the middle of your successful career you dropped everything to work for the environment fulltime. Was there one significant moment when the need to protect the planet overtook you, or was it more of a gradual process?

LAURIE DAVID: There were two things that happened to me. One was that I had the privilege of hearing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speak and he defined environmental issues as the civil rights issue of our time. That was a huge moment for me. Right when that happened, I decided to devote my full energy toward environmental issues.

The second thing that impacted me was the explosion of SUVs. For some reason, I just understood very quickly that the more popular these cars became, the bigger the global warming problem was going to be—that we were now putting double the amount of global warming pollutants into the atmosphere just to get to where we were going. I got really panicked, because all of my friends were driving them. I read Keith Bradsher's book High and Mighty, which explained that SUVs had low fuel economy standards, that they were being classified as trucks instead of cars so that they could get through all these loopholes. That moment when SUVs started to proliferate was the moment when I started to get seriously active.

LIME: And that did happen very quickly. It was a moment. It came out of nowhere and all of sudden SUVs were on every street in America.

LAURIE DAVID: Exactly! And all my friends were driving them. My friends were people who cared about these issues, were concerned about our dependency on oil, and cared about environmental issues. And they were buying these cars! So it was like, "okay, I have to at least do something to get my friends to stop buying them." That's when I started working on popularizing the hybrid. We came out with commercials that sort of connected the dots—when you're filling up your tank, where is that money going? How is it funding these extreme countries that hate us? How was it going to impact our national security? That was the first official campaign I worked on.

LIME: Not only has An Inconvenient Truth been a success at the box office, but it's also generated a lot of buzz earlier in the summer, which translates into awareness of the issue. To an outsider, it seems like everything went off perfectly from conception to opening weekend. Were there any major obstacles that seemed insurmountable in getting this picture made and put into theaters? Was there ever a point when you thought the movie just wouldn't work out?

LAURIE DAVID: There was never one second when I thought the movie wouldn't work out. The irony of the whole thing is that it takes a long time to make a movie... we made this movie in six months. The distributor bought it [and] they released it five months later. There was such an unbelievable urgency to get this movie out that we did the impossible. I think the challenge is the challenge that exists right now, which is to keep getting people into the theaters.

We need everyone to see this movie. We need the President of the United States to see this movie, and he said he doubts that he will. We need everyone in his administration to see this movie. You know, we need republicans and democrats. The challenge that's really facing us right now is to continue to get people who might not ordinarily be drawn to the material or drawn to the issue into the theaters, with their kids, to watch this film.

LIME: How do you communicate to someone whose response is "doubt it," when asked if he'll see this movie?

LAURIE DAVID: The response of "doubt it," is just one of either total ignorance or complete denial, and either one is unacceptable. It's just unacceptable. And I hope that reporters will continue to ask him if he'll see it. The more coverage the movie gets, the more people that go to see it, the more pressure there is going to be on [the Bush administration] to see what all the fuss is about. I hope they will ultimately go see it and I hope it continues to do as well as it's been doing.

LIME: At LIME we focus on a sense of personal balance. But we sometimes come across this attitude that you have to do everything; "You can't do thing x-y-z and call yourself an environmentalist. You've got to live in an organic hemp tent and eat only naturally occurring vegetation."

LAURIE DAVID: Well, I reject that completely. In fact, I'm writing a book that's coming out in September and I talk about that. I think that's one of the worst attitudes you can have. What I talk about all the time is that it's not about doing everything. It's about doing something. And if we got everyone doing something, we'd be well on our way to solving a lot of these problems. That's a really important point. That's what I believe, and that's what I've espoused to other people.

LIME: Is there one practical change the average person can make to her or his habits that will help make a difference for the planet?

LAURIE DAVID: I think it's up to the individual. My hope is that everyone will want to do something, and then after they've done that, they're going to want to do one thing more.

Buying a hybrid car is one great way of having a significant impact. There are small things that you can do—everything from changing your light bulbs to these compact fluorescent bulbs, to only buying recycled paper products.

I want people to join the virtual march. I have a virtual march on the internet at Stopglobalwarming.org. All it takes is an email address. So, join this virtual march. It's saying, okay, there's a problem and we want it solved. [When you join the march] now we get to count you as one of the hundreds of thousands of people who are already marching. And we get to educate you a little bit and tell you stories about how this problem is impacting you. That's one thing I urge everyone to do, be counted on the virtual march. Have you seen that website?

LIME: I have.

LAURIE DAVID: Have you joined?

LIME: I have.

LAURIE DAVID: Okay, good. We ask people to send it to five friends. I launched it with Senator McCain and Bobby Kennedy, which I think really reflects that this is not a political issue, it's a moral issue. We've got two football teams [St. Louis Rams and Philadelphia Eagles] marching. We've got all kinds of unlikely people. Because the truth is, we're all guilty and we all have to be a part of the solution.

LIME: Back on the issue of changes to habits, it seems like what's really important is to bring an awareness to each decision you make.

LAURIE DAVID: And with awareness comes a burden, I think. And the burden is to do something. I feel that burden. I want everybody to feel it with me. It's going to take all of us. But, again, it's not about sacrifice, it's about change. We can make these changes with very little sacrifice, I think. In fact, there are things we should be doing anyway, things that are going to make our country better. Things that are going to provide more jobs, give us a clean industrial revolution, which we're desperate for. There all things we should be doing anyway, to make our country better and the world better.

LIME: With the successes of the Earth to L.A.! shows, Earth to America!, Too Hot Not To Handle, StopGlobalWarming.org, and An Inconvenient Truth under your belt, what future plans do you have to continue to bring climate change issues to the front-burner of the American mind? You mentioned the book...

LAURIE DAVID: Yeah, I'm writing a book called The Solution is You and it's an activist's guidebook, you know, how I became an activist and why you have to become one. So that's coming out in September and I'm going to be speaking at college campuses and around the country, supporting that book.

I'm also working on a children's book, something that will go into the schools to educate kids in a way that they can understand. It's not too wonky. We absolutely have to start getting this issue into schools across the country, so I'm working on that. One day at a time.

The big push, of course, is still to get people into the theaters [to see An Inconvenient Truth]. And there's a goal to get a DVD into every school in the country. There's a lot still to do, unfortunately.

Peek into the home of global-warming activist Laurie David and get ideas on how to make yours more eco-friendly, too, with this new video at Glamour.com.