Hello and welcome to the Culture Gab Fest.

I'm Stephen Metcalf, Slate's Critic-at-Large.

And joining me today are Julia Turner, Slate's culture editor.

Hello, Julia.

Hi.

And Dana Stevens, Slate's film critic.

Hello, Dana.

Hi, Steve.

Today is the Personal Virtue edition of the Slate Culture Gab Fest.

We're talking about three topics, the viability of personal virtue when it comes to solving the problem of global warming,

the failure of personal virtue on the part of the travel writing industry,

and the apparent utter failure of personal virtue within the hallucinatory insides of the travel writing industry and the apparent utter failure of personal virtue within the

hallucinatory insides of the Abu Ghreb prison complex in Iraq. And we thought we'd start with a

provocative article essay by Michael Pollan in the Sunday New York Times magazine. Michael Pollan is a

contributing writer to that publication. He's very well known for books such as The Omnivores Dilemma, and he has a new book out called In Defense of Food. Paulin's a very interesting writer. He's somewhere in between Alice Waters and Upton Sinclair. He writes about sort of the human ecology of eating and its effect on the environment. There's a political undercurrent to what he writes.

At the same time, he's advocating pleasure.

There's nothing sort of self-denying about his various theses in favor of eating well and eating locally and farming responsibly.

He's written an article which I read, I'll be curious to see whether you agree or disagree with me,

as a kind of response principally to sort of the dismissive and quite cynical attitude of Dick Cheney about personal virtue when it comes to being environmentally minded. And Cheney, of course, meant that as a diminishing phrase and with a faint sort of attitude of ridicule to it. Pollan's initial proposed idea is to plant your own garden. So, Julia, let's start with you. I'm very interested what your reaction to this article was and whether or not you've gone out and bought peat moss and manure and you're starting to work the soil. Well, I don't actually have a garden. I have a fire escape and I haven't yet tested.. It's my first spring in this apartment, and I don't yet know whether it will support my weight, much less the weight of a pot full of basil, which I think is about as much as I'm going to get to planting. I read Michael Pollan's argument with interest because I am someone who became in college an environmentalism skeptic as a weird byproduct of taking a geology class.

It's this weird mind-multing thing where you begin to see the Earth in this epic time scale,

and you realize that there have been so many fluctuations in what kinds of things have existed on Earth,

that you suddenly begin to see environmentalism as an incredibly selfish urge to preserve Earth as we know it so our

...