The staff of Corporate Knights celebrates the life of Peter Gorrie, a longtime contributor who passed away Jan. 4th at the age of 71. Peter covered environmental issues for more than 30 years, with a focus on climate change, biodiversity, renewable energy and the North.
An avid traveler, canoeist and truth-teller, Peter helped pioneer environmental journalism in Canada through his work at the Toronto Star. Over the last decade, he wrote regularly for Corporate Knights, on subjects as varied as biogas, advanced battery technologies and urban flood risks, although his passion was electric vehicles. Former CK editor Tyler Hamilton remembers Peter as dependable, soft-spoken and thoughtful: “Skeptical, as any good journalist should be, but not to the point of being jaded.”
Corporate Knights contributor Shawn McCarthy fondly recalls his friendship with Gorrie. "He and I worked at The Star together - we were once partners in a baseball rotisserie league and worked the environment beat together after I went to The Globe. He was a prince of a guy."
“Peter was a gentle and practical soul with a deep love for our planet who cared about getting the details right,” recalls CK founder and publisher Toby Heaps. “One of his last assignments for us involved working through a complex spreadsheet that would properly gauge the total cost of ownership of an electric car versus its gasoline-burning equivalent. We went back and forth over many e-mails to get to a point where he was satisfied the model was accurate. It ended up being a beautiful story about the electric car you thought you couldn’t afford, and was one of the most-read articles in Corporate Knights’ history.”
Says Heaps: “Peter will missed by many, and will always be an inspiration for current and future journalists covering the plight of mother nature.”
