Mark Mathew Braunstein is an American writer, nature photographer, art librarian, and advocate of medical marijuana legalization. His writing focuses on the topics of vegetarianism/veganism, wildlife conservation, animal rights, sprouting, and raw food. Braunstein has written four books including Radical Vegetarianism: A Dialectic of Diet and Ethic, and magazine articles.
Life
Braunstein was born in New York City. His parents were Benjamin and Clare Braunstein. Benjamin Braunstein was a book critic and a literature and journalism teacher at Bayside High School, Queens, New York City. Clare Braunstein was a homemaker and an editor of the Hadassah newsletter, and of its cookbook entitled One People, One Heart: Culinary Classics. Mark Braunstein has a brother, Jack A. Braunstein of Gibson, Pennsylvania. In 1969, Mark Braunstein graduated from Farmingdale High School In 1974 he received his B.A. degree from the State University of New York at Binghamton. In 1978 he received a Master of Science degree at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn. From 1978 to 1980, Braunstein was Editor at Rosenthal Arts Slides, Chicago. From 1980-1983 he was Assistant editor at Art Index in New York City. From 1983-1987 he was Head of slides and photographs at Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. Since 1987, he has been Art slide curator at Connecticut College, New London, Connecticut. Braunstein has been a vegetarian since 1966 and a vegan since 1970. In 1981, Braunstein published his magnum opus, Radical Vegetarianism: A Dialectic of Diet and Ethic. Washington Post columnist Colman McCarthy referred to it as a "remarkably intelligent book". An "About the Author" blurb in 1990 said this:
Mark M. Braunstein is the author of Radical Vegetarianism: A Dialectic of Diet & Ethic. In addition to editing reference books on art history, he writes about animal rights and wildlife for journals such as Animals' Agenda, Between the Species, Vegetarian Times, Backpacker and East West. He lives in a wildlife refuge in Quaker Hill, CT, where his favourite hobby is sabotaging hunting. He served as the guest editor for this issue of The Trumpeter.
On August 6, 1990, Braunstein became a paraplegic due to a spinal cord injury from a diving accident. Since then, he smokes marijuana to control the pain and spasms in his feet and has been an advocate of medical marijuana legalization. He testified before committees of the Connecticut legislature seven times over 14 years, urging passage of bills to legalize medical marijuana. Braunstein, after discovering that some prostitutes were meeting with clients on his private road, began documenting their lives. From his photographs of them and their life stories collected over a ten-year period, he created a literary and photography project entitled "Good Girls on Bad Drugs", which explores the lives of streetwalkers in the New London, Connecticut, area. In October 2017, Braunstein published a book entitled Good Girls on Bad Drugs: Addiction Nonfiction of the Unhappy Hookers. Braunstein is single and lives in Quaker Hill, Connecticut.
