Peter Forbes is a writer, photographer, farmer and conservationist. A student of the relationship between land and people, he’s worked throughout the world to record and protect our human relationships with the land. Peter’s life-long pursuit is to be a witness and storyteller of the bond between people and the land, and to translate what he has learned into a new form of leadership. Peter is recognized across North America for building bridges between sectors, coalitions and organizations and for nurturing a new land movement integrating land health, social justice, and human spirit.

Peter co-founded Center for Whole Communities after eighteen years leading conservation projects for the Trust for Public Land. Peter helped to protect threatened portions of Thoreau’s Walden Woods; he launched a program to protect and revitalize urban gardens and farms across new England; he helped to add 20,000 acres of wild lands to New Hampshire’s White Mountain National Forest, and he created the Good Life Center in Harborside, Maine, to promote the life ways of renowned land and social activists Helen and Scott Nearing. Through the success of more than one hundred conservation projects, Peter earned a national reputation as being a champion of a new brand of community-based conservation where the health of the people and the health of the land are viewed as equal.

His photography and essays have appeared in many books and he has given hundreds of keynote addresses around the country. Others have written of Peter’s thinking and storytelling that he is “a national treasure whose groundbreaking work is a stunning reminder of why land conservation is still so important.” He is the editor of Our Land, Ourselves: Readings on People and Place and he is the author of The Great Remembering: Further Thoughts on Land, Soul and Society (TPL/Chelsea Green, 2001). His essays have also appeared in Coming to Land in a Troubled World (Center for Land and People/Chelsea Green) His photographs of homesteader and social activist, Bill Coperthwaite, are published in A Handmade Life, which won first prize in 2003 from the Independent Bookseller’s Association for most inspiring story.

Learn more at www.wholecommunities.org.