Peter Thomson spent eight weeks at MacDowell in the fall-winter of 2003-2004 working on the manuscript for Sacred Sea: A Journey to Lake Baikal. The project was an unconventional mix of science journalism, travelogue, and memoir exploring the past, present, and possible futures of Siberia’s legendary Lake Baikal. Lake Baikal is the Earth’s largest, deepest, and oldest body of fresh water and a crucible of evolution increasingly threatened by development. The book also chronicled the journey around the world by boat and train that took him and his younger brother from Boston to Baikal and back and the events in his life that set the journey in motion. Sacred Sea was published in 2007 to glowing reviews, including in The New York Times, which described it as “superb” and “compelling.” It would almost certainly have been neither without the time he spent and the relationships he forged at MacDowell.
Peter has not written another book since, and may well never do so. In his other life he is a multi-award-winning public radio journalist who’s spent most of the last 30 years covering the human relationship with the rest of the natural world and the emerging global climate crisis, most recently in a decade-long stint as the founding editor of the environment desk at the daily PRI/BBC global news program The World, based at WGBH in Boston.
As of late 2019 Peter is developing a new journalism project exploring the way ways that the next generations of humans—including his own young daughter—might live on a planet whose natural support systems are being radically altered by human activity.
