Monday, October 29, 2012

Paul Epstein, November 16, 1943 – November 13, 2011

While working as a writer/producer on a video for Climate Action Brookline in January, 2011 I had the opportunity to interview Dr. Paul Epstein, a global health expert, physician and co-founder of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School. Paul was a pioneer in the study of how climate change affects public health, researching its role in cholera outbreaks, malaria, the widening range of Lyme disease and the dramatic increase in asthma over the past 25 years. Paul served as science advisor to Al Gore on the production of An Inconvenient Truth. As so often happens, only a fraction of Paul's interview was used in the final video. Director Ian Brownell had the foresight to store the raw footage in a server.

Just a few months after the Climate Action Brookline video was shown, Paul died of lymphoma. In collaboration with Ian Brownell, I am publishing 11 short videos from this footage, with the hope that we will help to keep his vision alive at a time when his message is more urgent than ever.