Commentary

Senior Counsel

Peter has been an environmental, land use, and consumer attorney and advocate since 1983. He has held various roles in Washington, DC including Of Counsel at the Center for Food Safety; Vice President for U.S. Government Policy at Conservation International; Director of International Conservation at Defenders of Wildlife; and Staff Attorney at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Additionally, he worked as a contracted consultant on endangered species recovery efforts with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Turner Endangered Species Fund in New Mexico. Prior to that, he served as an Attorney and Policy Analyst for the U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, and was also in private law practice. His career has centered on bringing the best science to bear in environmental protection efforts; he has specialized in working with scientists so their findings can inform good policy, as well as in federal litigation. Most of his work has been in aid of wildlife conservation in the fields of pesticides, genetically modified organisms, invasive species, wildlife disease prevention, international trade, land use conflicts, and other areas. Peter received his law degree from the University of Puget Sound (now Seattle University) School of Law and also has a master’s degree in Environmental Studies from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, with a focus on conservation biology.

BLOG: Proposed Changes Will Fillet NEPA – PEER Public Comments

by Kevin Bell | March 11, 2020
PEER submitted comments opposing the Commission on Environmental Quality's proposal to undermine the nation’s foundational environmental law, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA ...

BLOG: Pesticides: Persistent Threat to Birds, Bees and Humans

by Peter Jenkins | February 25, 2020
With roughly 40 percent of insect life threatened with extinction over the coming decades, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) continues to gamble by keeping powerful insecticides that Europe has banned, registered in the United States ...

BLOG: Weak Industrial Accident Emissions Rule Final But Not Effective

by Paula Dinerstein | February 19, 2020
After more than 20 years of delay and a successful lawsuit by PEER and chemical safety advocacy groups, the Chemical Safety Board (CSB) dashed hopes that it would at long last issue a robust rule requiring the reporting of incidents involving the release of dangerous chemicals from oil ...

BLOG | Attack on Climate Science – 2020 Update

by Tim Whitehouse | January 31, 2020
The Trump administration’s pro-industry, anti-science agenda has undermined the work of every federal agency that conducts climate science and has a broad chilling effect on agency personnel ...

Groups Petition EPA to Regulate PFAS Waste

by Kyla Bennett | January 16, 2020
Absence of any federal standards for tracking and managing wastes contaminated with toxic polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) poses a major and growing threat to our health, water, and soil ...

BLOG: EPA Continues to Approve Bee-Killing Insecticides

by Peter Jenkins | January 8, 2020
With over 40 percent of insect life threatened with extinction, the EPA continues to issue emergency exemptions to toxic pollinator-killing insecticides ...
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