Wish you could ask Laurie David, producer of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” your questions about the environment? How about chatting with Newt Gingrich about bipartisan environmentalism? For those unacquainted with Slate.com’s Earth Chats, it’s a great online discussion series featuring leading environmental thinkers, leaders and advocates who answer readers’ questions about environmental issues, and what we can do to improve our earthly habitat. This week being Earth Week, Slate chatted with a slew of heavy-hitting advocates. We’ve provided this week’s schedule below, with accompanying links to chat transcripts:

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When you’re a socially conscious, citizen-activist-kind-of-celebrity, you get to do cool stuff like redirect that blinding media glare to spotlight your own pet causes. The thing is, though, once you make a name for yourself as a champion of, say, animal rights, or fighting global warming, you can’t just talk the talk, you gotta walk the walk.

So Laurie David really shouldn’t have been so shocked to get a call from Paul McCartney the other day, explaining why she, producer of An Inconvenient Truth, should think about eating less meat. As Laurie blogged over at Huffington Post, Sir Paul told her about “a big trend happening in Europe called “Meat Reducers” where, along with recycling and not taking plastic bags, people are eating meat at least one day less a week. A simple thing everyone can do to lower their own carbon footprint.”

See, when you’re a famous vegetarian, you get to call up famous climate change activists that you don’t personally know out of the blue and point out that if they’re serious about fighting global warming, they need to cut back on the burgers.

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