Peter Thomson

Peter Thomson has been covering the broad swath of issues related to the environment and global sustainability for more than 25 years and signed on as The World’s environment editor in 2008. 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.

He is the author of the acclaimed book Sacred Sea: A Journey to Lake Baikal, about the world’s largest, deepest, oldest and most ecologically unique lake. 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 Institutes for Journalism and Natural Resources and the International Reporting Project, with whom he traveled to China in 2010. He served 15 years on the board of Directors of the Society of Environmental Journalists and currently sits on the advisory board of the Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting.