Peter's a public radio "lifer" who got hooked on radio journalism in high school, while listening to and then interning with
Danny Schechter the News Dissector at Boston's legendary
WBCN. From college radio at
WYSO and
WMUA and detours through such promising alternate career paths as bike messenger, oyster shucker, DJ, substitute teacher and housepainter, he worked his way into his first reporting position at
WFCR in Amherst, Massachusetts and soon became a regular stringer for NPR. After stints at WBUR and Monitor Radio in Boston he signed on as the founding editor and producer of NPR’s groundbreaking new environmental news program
Living on Earth, in 1991. In nearly 10 years at the program, Peter helped establish
Living on Earth as the preeminent broadcast source for environmental news and helped the program earn numerous awards and honors. He also reported for the program on issues from
oil and natives on Alaska’s North Slope to
solar power development in rural Morocco.
Peter's work has received more than two dozen awards, including a
2016 AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Gold Award for audio. He’s been a fellow at the
MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study and Conference Center in Italy, the
National Center for Atmospheric Research, the
Marine Biological Laboratory, the
Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources, and the
International Reporting Project, with whom he traveled to China in 2010, and in 2014 received a fellowship from the Heinrich Boell Foundation
to report on advances in renewable energy storage technology in Germany. He served 15 years on the board of Directors of the
Society of Environmental Journalists, 10 years on the advisory board of the
Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting, and five years on the advisory board of the
Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources.
Peter lives in a super-efficient,
Deep-Energy-Retrofitted 100 year-old Boston
triple-decker with his wife, Edith and his very curious young daughter, Eleanor. He is often found nursing one basketball injury or another but doesn't have the sense to stay off the court.