Peter was born in Montreal in 1941. Fired in his imagination by his grandfather’s stories of geological mapping and prospecting in northern Ontario, and by his own love of canoe travel, Peter saw his future in northern Canada. He did field research in the Western Canadian Arctic while obtaining graduate degrees in geography. During his career with the Canadian government, and later as an independent consultant, he studied, wrote about, and advised on matters relating to resource development, environmental impact, and Indigenous land claims across the North from Labrador to Alaska.
In recent years he has turned his interest to the theme of war and society as seen through the life stories of Canadian airmen in the Second World War, some of whom were his relatives. His books interweave biography, social history, and military history.
Peter lives in Lanark County, Ontario where over nearly fifty years he has turned a marginal hundred acre farm into a sustainably managed forest. When he is not writing, he reads, bicycles around the countryside, and works in his woodlot.