"Peter Dykstra – newsman, provocateur, friend and former publisher of EHN – passed away Wednesday."

"“Are you a Tigers fan?”

That was the first thing Peter Dykstra said to me when we finally met in person at a Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) conference in 2013. He had a blue sportcoat with a mustard stain on it, a Red Sox baseball hat slightly askew, and command of the room.

Peter, publisher of Environmental Health News at the time, had hired me as a staff writer, my first professional journalism job. I was anxious, suffering the kind of impostor syndrome anyone young and unproven feels at a professional conference.

But Peter wanted to talk about baseball.

I was — and am — a lifelong Detroit Tigers fan. So instead of talking about toxics, glacial melt or our editorial calendar, we talked baseball. “Let me tell you about the time I met Jim Leyland in Florida at spring training … he was smoking a cigarette by the bleachers …” Peter said of the Tigers’ manager at the time. And off he went."

Brian Bienkowski reports for Environmental Health News August 1, 2024. [2]