Background

Paul Greenberg was born on the 4th of July in 1967 in New York, United States to the family of Harvey Greenberg. He was growing up in Connecticut. Since childhood, Paul has been an avid fisher.

Education

Paul Greenberg attended Brown University majoring in Russian studies.

Career

From 1992 to 1996 Paul Greenberg was director of media training for the nonprofit Internews Network, where he supervised the professional development of young television journalists in the former Soviet Union.

In 1996 Greenberg was promoted to director of Balkan Media projects at Internews. He worked in Sarajevo, Belgrade, and Zagreb and was responsible for the production of cross-cultural television series. These included Fresh, a weekly news program that featured Bosnians of all nationalities, Balkan Bridges, a monthly show that used satellite technology to reunite people who were separated by war, Kosovo: A View from Inside, which documented Albanian life in Kosovo, and The Hague Diaries, a weekly show that provided news about the International War Crimes Tribunal for Yugoslavia.

In 1998 Greenberg left Internews to become a full-time novelist and screenwriter. His first work, an autobiographical novel Leaving Katya, was published in 2002. It depicts a cross-cultural relationship between an American man and a Russian woman. As his story begins, young Daniel, who comes from a family of eccentrics, is fascinated with Russia - a fascination his family and friends think is just a phase. He works on his Russian-language skills, travels to Russia, and works hard to get a job in Russian television. While on this quest, he meets a Russian woman named Katya and falls deeply in love with her after one night they spend together. The relationship is complicated by deep cultural differences and by Katya’s personality: she is moody and secretive, and he can never fully understand her. Greenberg's novel became a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection.

Later, Paul Greenberg immersed into the research of the future of the ocean and became the New York Times bestselling author of Four Fish, American Catch, and The Omega Principle. In 2017 he co-produced the documentary The Fish on My Plate.

In addition to it, Greenberg lectures widely on seafood and ocean sustainability. His lecture venues include Google, the United States Senate, the United States Supreme Court, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, the New England Aquarium, The Culinary Institute of America, Harvard University, Brown University, Williams College, Yale University’s Peabody Museum, Chefs Collaborative National Summit, SeaWeb’s Seafood Summit, and Paine & Partners annual shareholders meeting.

Besides, Greenberg has written episodes for The Invisible Man, an action/adventure show on the Sci-Fi Channel.

Achievements

• Greenberg is the winner of a James Beard Award for Writing and Literature, a Pew Fellow in Marine Conservation, and the writer-in-residence at the Safina Center.
  
  His work Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food has been published throughout Europe and Asia and was picked by The New York Times and The New Yorker as a notable book of 2010.
  
  Greenberg's TED Talk on the seafood economy in 2015 has already reached more than 1 600 000 views.
  
  In addition to his fiction and nonfiction writing in the United States, Greenberg has worked extensively overseas with long-term assignments in Russia, Ukraine, France, the Caucasus, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, the West Bank/Gaza, and many other locations around the world. His essays have been published internationally in The Times of London, The Observer (UK), The Age (Australia), Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany), and The Globe and Mail (Canada). Four Fish is forthcoming in Korea, Taiwan, Russia, Greece, Italy, Spain, and Germany.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Leaving Katya

    (When Daniel, a young American, falls in love with the eni...)

    2002
  • The Omega Principle: Seafood and the Quest for a Long Life and a Healthier Planet

    (It's an eye-opening investigation of the history, science...)

    2018
  • American Catch: The Fight for Our Local Seafood

    (Paul Greenberg uncovers the tragic unraveling of the nati...)

    2014
  • Goodbye Phone, Hello World

    (Goodbye Phone, Hello World features 65 bite-size, device-...)

    2020
  • Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food

    (Paul Greenberg takes us on a journey, examining the four ...)

    2010

Views

Greenberg argues against overfishing. He says if you'd asked him about fishing before he wrote the book Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food, he'd say he definitely wanted to catch something to bring home to the family. Not so much anymore.

Quotations: "The older I get, there's part of me that kind of enjoys not catching something," he says. "I still go fishing. I still keep fish that I catch but I definitely viscerally feel it is a deduction I'm making from nature and there must be some karmic price to pay for it."

"The word seafood is kind of a remarkably cruel word. Everything that we eat from land, do we call it 'landfood'?"

"If I were tsar of all salmon farming and could redirect investment money at will, I might take all of those dollars that go into transgenic research and put that money into really confronting the problems that plague the industry. I might look to developing efficient, above ground, re-circulating aquaculture systems. These facilities allow fish to be grown in temperature-controlled environments without any interaction with the wild. Disease transfer and genetic pollution are greatly reduced if not eliminated altogether."

Interests

• Fishing

Connections

Paul has a daughter, Tanya Greenberg.

Father:

Harvey Greenberg

Daughter:

Tanya Greenberg

colleague:

David McCormick

colleague:

Meg Thompson

References

• Official web-site