Whole Life Times: The Accidental Activist

April 2006 | Features

The Accidental Activist

As a high-powered talent manager concerned for the environment, Laurie David used to yell out her car window at SUV drivers for killing the planet. Now a fulltime eco-activist, David corrals the power of Hollywood to stop global warming in its tracks.

by Margaret Wappler

When first meeting Laurie David, it might be easy to write her off as a typical upper-echelon Westside wife, just another face in the well-coifed crowd—Starbucks, Blackberries and Bugaboos in tow. It might be tempting to discount her environmental work as little more than a Hollywood pet cause, an excuse to throw lavish dinner parties. But after spending five minutes with David—activist, mother, wife, producer and former talent manager—it’s crystal clear that she defies even the most tenacious of LA stereotypes. A tough but smooth combination of smart, steely, warm and considerate, David is impassioned to the point of intimidating, and above all dedicated to what she calls her life’s work: stopping global warming. “[It’s] the mother of all issues,” David insists. “In 10 years, if we don’t make serious changes, we’re going to be faced with a world we won’t want to live in.”

At a posh seaside Santa Monica hotel, David waits for me (the easily confused Eastsider, running late to our interview) clad in a soft-rose velvet suit over a pinstriped button-down and knee-high espresso Chanel boots. “I can’t believe I beat you here,” she quips with a tart, slightly mischievous smile. She’s letting me know she’s got a lot better things to do than wait around. And she certainly does—but first, the tanned, statuesque 47-year-old Long Island native fingers my dangly earrings and gushes, “Oh I love these!” I’m at ease now, but it’s only temporary. In a few minutes, while discussing stopglobalwarming.org—the website she started with Sen. John McCain and Robert Kennedy Jr. that’s hosting a virtual march on Washington some 280,000 members-strong—David will insist to me that I need to sign up immediately. She will say it twice in a row in a calm, forceful tone that makes it clear she expects me to comply.

Curb Your Gas-Guzzler

Every weekday morning, David, one of the leading global warming activists in the country, gets up at the crack of dawn to pore over the latest environmental news, which she gathers from a hodgepodge of blogs and papers including The Huffington Post, the Drudge Report, The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, before embarking on the endless e-mails, meetings and phone calls requisite to world-changing. She’s also a very active mother to two daughters, 10 and 13, whom she drives to and from school and has dinner with every night. And then there’s the tireless job of being a springboard for all of husband Larry David’s pickled observations on humankind, not to mention having her life’s events ransacked for material to fuel his two shows, the defunct but beloved Seinfeld and HBO’s misanthropy-fest, Curb Your Enthusiasm. But not much phases this former talent booker for the Late Show with David Letterman, and Laurie seems to juggle her many tasks gracefully. Even her spouse’s myriad judgments she waves off with a small swipe of her hand. “Eh, I’m used to him,” she says in the native Long Island-ese that pops up only here and there. Besides, she points out with a smile, Larry has been a great help: because of his disdain for mankind, she can now work on behalf of it.

David’s family has been the catalyst for her work as an environmentalist in other ways as well. It was while pushing her children’s strollers around her Pacific Palisades neighborhood that she noticed the affluent area was teeming with gas-guzzling SUVs. “I started to educate myself about these cars. Once I learned, I realized I had to do something… If you knew that what you were driving was impacting the planet, impacting our climate, you would think about it. Well, all my friends were driving these cars but no one had connected the dots. And it just became clear to me that I had to help do something about it.”

Setting her career ambitions to become the president of a network aside, David found industry work paled in comparison to the urgency of environmental action. But the trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and co-chair of its Action Forum and Executive Forum points out that not all her showbiz lessons and skills were left in the dust. Her Hollywood-honed persistence has paid off with the Detroit Project, an organization she founded with Arianna Huffington and others to petition the car industry to make more fuel-efficient vehicles. The Detroit Project scored a significant victory when California passed a law to allow fuel-efficient cars to travel in the carpool lane. David is also still very active as a producer: Her HBO documentary about national effects of global warming, Too Hot Not to Handle, airs April 22, and in a slightly different take on the producing role, David, a former reporter for the now-defunct Record World magazine, will guest edit Elle, which—in a fashion magazine first—will print its May issue on recycled paper.

One of the projects that most excites David is the feature-length documentary she produced about former Vice Pres. Al Gore’s tireless work on behalf of the environment, airing in theaters next month. While working on An Inconvenient Truth, the country was going through Hurricane Katrina, which, to David and Gore, felt like the worst kind of vindication. “We’d all huddle around Gore’s computer and look at the news on the Internet,” David says. “You could not tear your eyes away from it… seeing people displaced and trapped. It was coming to you in living color.” It was the kind of preventable catastrophe that scientists have been warning about for years, the kind David had read about in Gore’s impassioned environmental plea, Earth in the Balance (Plume, 1993).

David is undeniably proud of her accomplishments, but that doesn’t stop her from getting flat-out discouraged from time to time. Until very recently, she would confront anyone on the street driving an SUV. “I’m a very confrontational person,” she says with a mixture of pride and embarrassment. “It’s one of the traits my husband likes least about me.” At the behest of her family, David doesn’t yell out her window for drivers to think about what they’re doing to the planet anymore, but their disregard still affects her, if in a more considered and resolute way. “When I see a Hummer coming up to me, or a brand new Escalade, I get really discouraged,” she sighs, pauses for a moment, then shrugs. “But then I get back to work.”

Margaret Wappler wrote our November cover story on the best independent bookstores in LA. In addition to WLT, she is a regular contributor to The Believer, Nerve and LA Weekly.

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